"We can say that SoCal speakers do not ask questions when they should be making statements," Ritchart and Arvaniti.
The researchers found that uptalk is most frequently used to ask a question or for confirmation requests, but that's not it's only purpose, and the precise nature of the rise (how much and where it occurs in an utterance) is critical to conveying the intended meaning. The latter was particularly prevalent during the map task, since it required constant interaction between the two parties to navigate the landmarks. There were also so-called "holding the floor" uptalk utterances - a means of indicating that the speaker is not quite finished to avoid being interrupted - and using uptalk as a "confirmation request" to make sure the listener has understood correctly. And then they analyzed the recordings, specifically looking at the location of the rise in pitch in a given utterance, as well as how much it rose.įor instance, Ritchart and Arvaniti found that speakers tended to use a very small rise if they were making a statement, as opposed to a large rise if they were asking a question. For the second task, they were asked to provide directions for another person to help them navigate through a map of San Diego showing popular landmarks. In the first, participants watched a clip of a popular sitcom ( Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother) and then were asked to describe what happened in their own words.
Ritchart and Arvaniti gathered 23 native English speakers from among the UCSD student populace (12 women, 11 men), and had them perform two speech tasks. And while the speech patterns are often used to indicate a certain, shall we say "ditziness" (or insecurity), Ritchart and her colleague, Amalia Arvaniti, argue that the use of uptalk is actually quite nuanced in terms of how it is used to communicate meaning, based on their acoustical analysis of the vocal stylings of 23 UCSD undergraduates. Tweak the specific jargon just a tad and you'd have your typical Southern Californian student, circa 2013. Here is a classic example from the 1995 film Clueless (a re-imagining of the classic Jane Austen novel, Emma), in which our heroine, Cher, is giving a presentation in her high school debate class: It's the nature of language to continually evolve, and each teen generation has its own preferred slang, but at least in SoCal, uptalk has become a mainstay ("like" and "totally" have shown remarkable staying power, too). That's the conclusion of Amanda Ritchart, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), who reported on the results from her new study investigating the prevalence of uptalk (or "high rise terminals" in linguistic jargon) among Southern California young people at the annual fall meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this past week in San Francisco. There are now Valley Boys as well as Valley Girls, if the frequent use of uptalk is your metric. Unlike most pop culture fads, which tend to die out pretty quickly - it's no easy feat to " make fetch happen" - Val-speak didn't die out it spread, all over Southern California and across socioeconomic, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Soon everyone was walking around declaring their school lunches were "grody to the max," I mean, "gag me with a spoon," every uptalking utterance punctuated by frequent insertions of "like" and "totally." But I live like in a really good part of Encino so it's okay.įrank Zappa's quirky Top 40 hit from 1982, "Valley Girl," doesn't get much radio airplay these days, even on the "nostalgia" stations, but it captured the birth of a linguistic phenomenon in the running commentary provided by his daughter, Moon Unit - "val-speak," a strange dialect spoken by the female denizens of the San Fernando valley area in Southern California characterized by ending sentences with a slight rise in pitch, as if asking a question, now known as " uptalk." And it might have stayed in the Valley, too, if it weren't for that meddling musician and his daughter, who broadcast it to the masses.
0 kommentar(er)
