When: Wednesday, May 25, 2022, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PMWhere: Arts Two 3.16 and Zoom https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86526327434?pwd=UUVVQXRCMmpGdTNTeTBIbU1ocDVrQT09
Dr Nicolai Pharao will give a LingLunch talk entitled ' “…and like a leopard see-through sort of hot little number, which is exactly what I was called earlier today” Looking for social meanings in the speech of Danish drag queens'.
Abstract
Social meaning has always been an object of study in variationist sociolinguistics, increasingly so with the rise of third wave studies where social meaning takes center stage. Many different methods are used to capture the social meanings associated with phonetic variation. In this talk I will look at data for coronal obstruents (with a particular focus on [s], of course) drawing on acoustic analysis of different groups and how the variation patterns with topics and stances in the speech of a specific group of speakers, the Danish drag queen collective Vesterbro Dragudlejningsservice. The social meanings found by interpreting patterns observed in their speech production will then be compared to the results of a verbal guise indexicality experiment, where two of the queens supplied stimuli that were phonetically similar but yielded very different responses from participants. This will lead to a discussion of the indeterminate and fluid nature of social meaning as used by speakers and listeners.