Labov (2012): Dialect Diversity in America #
This file formalizes the one quantitative observation of [Lab12] that the library
consumes: the President's rate of the -in' variant of (ING) on three occasions of
increasing formality, a Father's Day barbecue, the interview that followed it, and a scripted
convention address, the book's illustration of the style shifting shared across the speech
community, its hidden consensus on the variable. obama_ING records the three rates and
obama_ING_monotone their strict decrease with formality, the intra-speaker counterpart of the
class-and-style stratification of [Lab06]; Studies/Burnett2019.lean derives the
direction of this shift from a speaker's social-meaning game.
Implementation notes #
The three contexts are the book's own occasions rather than the interview styles of [Lab06], and the observation is kept as a single record. The percentages are the book's; the figure and page on which they appear were not checked against a copy of the book.
References #
One speaker's rate of a variant on three occasions of increasing formality.
- casual : ℚ
The casual occasion.
- careful : ℚ
The careful occasion.
- formal : ℚ
The formal occasion.
Instances For
The President's rate of -in': 72% chatting at a barbecue, 33% answering questions at the ceremony that followed, 3% in the scripted acceptance speech.
Equations
- Labov2012.obama_ING = { casual := 72 / 100, careful := 33 / 100, formal := 3 / 100 }