The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, February 10, with a talk by Julia Swan (San José State University), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger." The abstract is as follows:
A pronunciation pattern affecting the vowels in FACE, DRESS and TRAP before the voiced velar /ɡ/ has been observed in many North American locales. In these communities, BEG and BAG are variably observed to raise and may merge with BAGEL, which is sometimes described as pre-velar raising or BAG-raising. The feature has been discussed as a diagnostic of variation within the Western U.S. dialect region. Drawing on sociophonetic analysis of young adults in the Pacific Northwest, I explore interspeaker variation and approximate a social meaning for the raised or merged variant. I complement this with a view from a collaborative perceptual study showing that, in communities where the BAG-BAGEL merger is attested in production, listeners also display less sensitivity to the phonemic distinction. Lastly, I provide a limited historical view of BAG-BEG-BAGEL merger to better pinpoint the timing of this development and explore possible explanations for its origins. Taken together, and corroborated by other scholarship, I argue that 1) despite these disparate locales and phonetically variable instantiations, there are unified articulatory and structural motivations for the pre-/ɡ/ phenomena affecting the front vowel system, 2) the phenomenon is best treated as a conditioned vowel merger rather than vowel raising, and 3) the diffusion of this feature among urban, West Coast, American talkers may be limited by its socioindexical meanings. This work underscores the importance of pursuing complementary approaches in the study of sound change that include variationist, community-level distinctions, an understanding of the interactional social meaning of the variants in local contexts, and studies of perception along with production.
