[Bruce Nevin 2018-11-24_20:03:40 UTC]
Rick Marken 2018-11-24_10:14:44Â --Â
Yes, this is much better. It’s a partial model of dialect divergence. Partial: as you say, among the conditions for emulation it includes only proximity. And it is unclear what is being controlled. It sounds like cause-effect: proximity to another causes convergence of an ‘internal’ value (more like an attribute) toward that of the other. You haven’t indicated how many approaches occur during a run that are close enough to trip this convergence of references. Observationally, change within a speech community is rather slow, typically requiring decades in stable social conditions. Are there enough ‘contacts’ for any given agent during a run to correlate with the number of speech interactions over a decade or so? A preference for approximating one kind of exemplary person and/or distancing oneself from the other kind of exemplar would have a slowing effect on the convergence.Â
Stepping back to naturalistic observation to speculate about potential variables, the rustic farmers and fishermen, found mostly and most often in the rural up-Island towns, but not at all exclusively or always, were viewed as quaint, authentic American … artifacts? … by visitors, admired for their hardiness, memorably painted by Hart Benton and others, but who would want to live that way nowadays. There they are, over there, see?Â
Those whose view was “Yes, I do want to live this way” had a similar observational distance from what my mother’s cohort called ‘summer ginks’. The performances of a soft city visitor who charters a fishing trip become the stuff of humerous anecdotes and jokes. You don’t want to be the butt of such humor if you’re a teenager especially. Not on a boat or in a field where you if say “It’s so cold, dad, I’m freezing!” he says gruffly “You’re not working hard enough” – kindly meant, for that is indeed how you stay warm in that kind of life. Success in that rural world requires interdependent mutual support, and appearing as though you think of yourself as being like those folks could put your reliability in question.Â
“In the old days,” I was told, “only the cows wanted a water view.” Those in the tourism bind (selling it erodes what you’re selling) couch their pitch from the visitor’s perspective. Old families with divided inheritance are forced to sell land because of taxes, which have gone up as the land values go up, the increase in value drawing speculators and flippers and teardown-to-mcmansion artists further driving up appraised values, and adding themselves and their values to the down-Island population. Construction becomes a major career option for young people. For every person you see here in the winter, there are 5 or 6 more people here in the summer, most of them bringing cars. Rents go up, people move out of their homes and camp to get the income, many families move in and out of winter rentals twice a year. (Presently, 80% of the Island’s housing stock lies vacant in winter while upwards of a hundred homeless people camp in the woods through the winter. The seasonal stresses were analogous at the time Labov was writing, though they had not yet reached these extremes.) Those who control self worth by means of controlling material wealth are among those who most emulate them. Seasonal merchants use the tourist economy as a money machine so they can live down south in the winter, perhaps aspiring eventually to be among the ‘summer community’ they serve.Â
More can be said about these painful distortions. I expect that a number of potentially controlled perceptions can be identified for testing or for indirect verification wrt documented observations. A fundamental reference is Milton Mazer’s People and predicaments: Of life and distress on Martha’s Vineyard, HUP 1976, dealing very closely with the time period of Labov’s observations.
RM: This is really interesting stuff and I would really like to keep working on it. But I’ve got other priorities at the moment but I could elevate the priority of this work if I could get a linguist or sociologist to work on it with me.  Â
Well, you’ve got one linguist here. Tell me what you need from me. Kent may be winding down or out into other engagements, but he might take an interest. Kent, might any of your students be interested?
···
/Bruce
On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 1:15 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
[Rick Marken 2018-11-24_10:14:44]
RM: Thanks for all the nice comments. But it turns out that the model results are plotted were based on a faulty model. My mistake was small by crucial: I basically got the error calculation in the model wrong so that the result was a positive feedback loop which I had limited by limiting the perceptual input to be no greater than the limits found in the data. I discovered this error while trying to think of how to get the model to converge to CI averages other than .66 and .33.Â
RM: When I fixed the model, things went even better than they had with the original, incorrect model. Here’s the results of one run:
RM: The reason this result is better is that the model converges (by chance) to different CI values on each run. The graph above shows only on result; the model converges to quite different values for the Up and Down Islanders on each run. This is a feature, not a bug, because it can account for the differences in CI averages for the subgroups in the Up and Down Island groups, as in this table:
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RM: Anyway, there is much more to do with the model. The main thing being to see if control for matching pronunciation based on variables besides proximity alone – such as the prestige of the speaker – would get the model to the different observed difference in average CI.Â
RM: This is really interesting stuff and I would really like to keep working on it. But I’ve got other priorities at the moment but I could elevate the priority of this work if I could get a linguist or sociologist to work on it with me.Â
BestÂ
Rick
–
Richard S. MarkenÂ
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery