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Escaping the Trap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2021

Anja Thiel  and
Aaron J. Dinkin
Anja Thiel
Affiliation:
University of Bern
Aaron J. Dinkin
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Abstract

We examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raise trap more in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raising trap between 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , October 2020 , pp. 373 - 398
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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