Robin Dodsworth
Biographic Data
| ID | 142891 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robin Dodsworth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robin |
| FAMILY NAME | Dodsworth |
| SIGNATURE | DODSWORTH R |
| AFFILIATIONS | North Carolina State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7734-8334 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
T d/ Releases are strengthening among White speakers: Evidence from a large-scale acoustic study of English in Raleigh
The release and aspiration of word-final /t/ and /d/ are important sociolinguistic variables in American English because they have strong, contextually driven indexicality. Word-final /t d/ releases are usually coded impressionistically due to the absence of automated methods for identifying prepausal release bursts or aspiration. This paper introduces an automated method for identifying released tokens prepausally and for measuring phonetic prop…
Supraregional Changes Are Uncorrelated
Research Article| December 01 2021 6. Supraregional Changes Are Uncorrelated: A Community Comparison Robin Dodsworth; Robin Dodsworth robin dodsworth is professor of English in the linguistics program at North Carolina State University. Her research investigates sociolinguistic variation, especially as it relates to socioeconomic and social network characteristics. Her 2020 book, coauthored with Richard Benton, is entitled Language Variation and …
Linguistic Employment Niches: Southern Dialect across Industries
The authors examine how linguistic niches may develop in certain industries. Using acoustic measurement techniques, the authors examine the extent to which workers in different industries display dialect features associated with the American South. The data are drawn from 190 semistructured sociolinguistic interviews from 2008 to 2017. Six linguistic variables were constructed to measure dialect features associated with southern American English.…
Language Variation and Social Networks
The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of …
Migration and Dialect Contact
A great deal of research during the past 40 years and earlier investigates the outcomes of large-scale contact between mutually intelligible dialects. In the context of well-established types of dialect convergence, this article summarizes research from the past 10 years on migration-induced dialect contact. I devote particular attention to ongoing dialect contact in the urban settings of London, England; São Paulo, Brazil; Xining, China; Amman, …
Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts
The monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants ( price ) relative to voiced or word-final environments ( prize ). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), this implies price and prize must be two ends of a phonetic continuum, rather than two di…
Semantic mapping: What happens to idioms in discourse
Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987,Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors.Cognitive Science21. 247-282) while in the experimental psycholinguisti…
Social network cohesion and the retreat from Southern vowels in Raleigh
Network research in sociolinguistics suggests that integration in a local community network promotes speakers' retention of local linguistic variants in the context of pressure from external or standard dialects. In most sociolinguistic network research, a speaker is assigned a single score along an index representing the aggregate of several network and other social features. We propose that contemporary network methods in adjacent disciplines c…
Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic
Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt one…
Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone
In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Southern U.S. city, five decades of in-migration of technology-sector workers from outside the South has resulted in large-scale contact between the local Southern dialect and non-Southern dialects. This paper investigates the speed and magnitude of the reversal of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) with respect to the five front vowels, using Trudgill's (1998) model of dialect contact as a framework. The data consist of…
Social Class
Revisiting the Need for New Approaches to Social Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
To better account for patterns in language variation by social class and to conceptualise and analyse social class in new and refined ways, many sociolinguists have recommended looking to theoretical and methodological advancements in sociology and anthropology. We review a contemporary sociological approach to social class, formulated by Joan Acker (2000, 2006), and apply it to the study of linguistic variation in two U.S. communities. While Ack…
Convergence in Blue-Collar Columbus, Ohio, African American and White Vowel Systems
Research Article| December 01 2009 CONVERGENCE IN BLUE-COLLAR COLUMBUS, OHIO, AFRICAN AMERICAN AND WHITE VOWEL SYSTEMS? DAVID DURIAN; DAVID DURIAN Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google ROBIN DODSWORTH; ROBIN DODSWORTH Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google JENNIFER SCHUMACHER JENNIFER SCHUMACHER Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2009) 94…
Subject-verb order in spoken Arabic: Morpholexical and event-based factors
This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders i…
Modeling Socioeconomic Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
Modeling socioeconomic class has been a persistent challenge in the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. While early stratificational models formulated on the basis of socioeconomic indicators such as income, occupation, and area of residence revealed compelling patterns of linguistic variation, they were critiqued for their lack of explanatory power at the interactional level and for their marginalization of those without paid employment. Subs…
Stability in Subject-Verb Word Order: From Contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic to Biblical Aramaic
This article differs from traditional treatments of subject-verb word order in Semitic in two respects. First, we take as our point of departure a detailed study of word order in contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic, which shows that the respective order of the subject and verb in that variety is determined by morpholexical and by discourse-immanent factors. From this starting point, we work backwards, applying the same analytical framework to …
Sociological consciousness as a component of linguistic variation 1
While practice theory has provided a valuable framework for establishing connections between individual‐level sociolinguistic variation and social structures, Bourdieu's (1977) formulation of practice theory has been argued to inadequately address subjectivity. The sociologist C. Wright Mills' (1959) concept of the sociological imagination – consciousness of links among personal experiences, social structures, and historical processes – is posite…
A consuming passion: An interview with George Ritzer
George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ritzer was co‐founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture with Don Slater. In addition to his considerable work in the area of the sociology of consumption, Ritzer is especially known for Metatheorizing in sociology (1991), The McDonaldization of society (1993 Ritzer, G. 1991. Metatheorizing in sociology, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. [Google…
Being (George Ritzer) and nothingness: An interview
Attribute networking: A technique for modeling social perceptions1
An original, network-based technique is presented for modeling community members' conceptions of local social space. Social categories derived from the model are used to investigate the social meaning of linguistic variation. The technique is first explained and then demonstrated using linguistic and ethnographic data from Worthington, Ohio, a Columbus suburb. Two linguistic variables are analyzed: (1)/l/ vocalization; and (2) the phonetic realiz…
Attribute Networking: A Sociolinguistic Technique for Modeling Subjective Social Space
Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone
In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Southern U.S. city, five decades of in-migration of technology-sector workers from outside the South has resulted in large-scale contact between the local Southern dialect and non-Southern dialects. This paper investigates the speed and magnitude of the reversal of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) with respect to the five front vowels, using Trudgill's (1998) model of dialect contact as a framework. The data consist of…
Social network cohesion and the retreat from Southern vowels in Raleigh
Network research in sociolinguistics suggests that integration in a local community network promotes speakers' retention of local linguistic variants in the context of pressure from external or standard dialects. In most sociolinguistic network research, a speaker is assigned a single score along an index representing the aggregate of several network and other social features. We propose that contemporary network methods in adjacent disciplines c…
Sociological consciousness as a component of linguistic variation 1
While practice theory has provided a valuable framework for establishing connections between individual‐level sociolinguistic variation and social structures, Bourdieu's (1977) formulation of practice theory has been argued to inadequately address subjectivity. The sociologist C. Wright Mills' (1959) concept of the sociological imagination – consciousness of links among personal experiences, social structures, and historical processes – is posite…
Attribute networking: A technique for modeling social perceptions1
An original, network-based technique is presented for modeling community members' conceptions of local social space. Social categories derived from the model are used to investigate the social meaning of linguistic variation. The technique is first explained and then demonstrated using linguistic and ethnographic data from Worthington, Ohio, a Columbus suburb. Two linguistic variables are analyzed: (1)/l/ vocalization; and (2) the phonetic realiz…
Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic
Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt one…
Language Variation and Social Networks
The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of …
Modeling Socioeconomic Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
Modeling socioeconomic class has been a persistent challenge in the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. While early stratificational models formulated on the basis of socioeconomic indicators such as income, occupation, and area of residence revealed compelling patterns of linguistic variation, they were critiqued for their lack of explanatory power at the interactional level and for their marginalization of those without paid employment. Subs…
A consuming passion: An interview with George Ritzer
George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ritzer was co‐founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture with Don Slater. In addition to his considerable work in the area of the sociology of consumption, Ritzer is especially known for Metatheorizing in sociology (1991), The McDonaldization of society (1993 Ritzer, G. 1991. Metatheorizing in sociology, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. [Google…
Migration and Dialect Contact
A great deal of research during the past 40 years and earlier investigates the outcomes of large-scale contact between mutually intelligible dialects. In the context of well-established types of dialect convergence, this article summarizes research from the past 10 years on migration-induced dialect contact. I devote particular attention to ongoing dialect contact in the urban settings of London, England; São Paulo, Brazil; Xining, China; Amman, …
Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts
The monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants ( price ) relative to voiced or word-final environments ( prize ). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), this implies price and prize must be two ends of a phonetic continuum, rather than two di…
Subject-verb order in spoken Arabic: Morpholexical and event-based factors
This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders i…
Semantic mapping: What happens to idioms in discourse
Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987,Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors.Cognitive Science21. 247-282) while in the experimental psycholinguisti…
Being (George Ritzer) and nothingness: An interview
Attribute Networking: A Sociolinguistic Technique for Modeling Subjective Social Space
Attribute networking: A technique for modeling social perceptions1
An original, network-based technique is presented for modeling community members' conceptions of local social space. Social categories derived from the model are used to investigate the social meaning of linguistic variation. The technique is first explained and then demonstrated using linguistic and ethnographic data from Worthington, Ohio, a Columbus suburb. Two linguistic variables are analyzed: (1)/l/ vocalization; and (2) the phonetic realiz…
Being (George Ritzer) and nothingness: An interview
Sociological consciousness as a component of linguistic variation 1
While practice theory has provided a valuable framework for establishing connections between individual‐level sociolinguistic variation and social structures, Bourdieu's (1977) formulation of practice theory has been argued to inadequately address subjectivity. The sociologist C. Wright Mills' (1959) concept of the sociological imagination – consciousness of links among personal experiences, social structures, and historical processes – is posite…
A consuming passion: An interview with George Ritzer
George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ritzer was co‐founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture with Don Slater. In addition to his considerable work in the area of the sociology of consumption, Ritzer is especially known for Metatheorizing in sociology (1991), The McDonaldization of society (1993 Ritzer, G. 1991. Metatheorizing in sociology, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. [Google…
Convergence in Blue-Collar Columbus, Ohio, African American and White Vowel Systems
Research Article| December 01 2009 CONVERGENCE IN BLUE-COLLAR COLUMBUS, OHIO, AFRICAN AMERICAN AND WHITE VOWEL SYSTEMS? DAVID DURIAN; DAVID DURIAN Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google ROBIN DODSWORTH; ROBIN DODSWORTH Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google JENNIFER SCHUMACHER JENNIFER SCHUMACHER Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2009) 94…
Subject-verb order in spoken Arabic: Morpholexical and event-based factors
This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders i…
Modeling Socioeconomic Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
Modeling socioeconomic class has been a persistent challenge in the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. While early stratificational models formulated on the basis of socioeconomic indicators such as income, occupation, and area of residence revealed compelling patterns of linguistic variation, they were critiqued for their lack of explanatory power at the interactional level and for their marginalization of those without paid employment. Subs…
Stability in Subject-Verb Word Order: From Contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic to Biblical Aramaic
This article differs from traditional treatments of subject-verb word order in Semitic in two respects. First, we take as our point of departure a detailed study of word order in contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic, which shows that the respective order of the subject and verb in that variety is determined by morpholexical and by discourse-immanent factors. From this starting point, we work backwards, applying the same analytical framework to …
Revisiting the Need for New Approaches to Social Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
To better account for patterns in language variation by social class and to conceptualise and analyse social class in new and refined ways, many sociolinguists have recommended looking to theoretical and methodological advancements in sociology and anthropology. We review a contemporary sociological approach to social class, formulated by Joan Acker (2000, 2006), and apply it to the study of linguistic variation in two U.S. communities. While Ack…
Social Class
Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone
In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Southern U.S. city, five decades of in-migration of technology-sector workers from outside the South has resulted in large-scale contact between the local Southern dialect and non-Southern dialects. This paper investigates the speed and magnitude of the reversal of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) with respect to the five front vowels, using Trudgill's (1998) model of dialect contact as a framework. The data consist of…
Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic
Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt one…
Migration and Dialect Contact
A great deal of research during the past 40 years and earlier investigates the outcomes of large-scale contact between mutually intelligible dialects. In the context of well-established types of dialect convergence, this article summarizes research from the past 10 years on migration-induced dialect contact. I devote particular attention to ongoing dialect contact in the urban settings of London, England; São Paulo, Brazil; Xining, China; Amman, …
Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts
The monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants ( price ) relative to voiced or word-final environments ( prize ). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), this implies price and prize must be two ends of a phonetic continuum, rather than two di…
Semantic mapping: What happens to idioms in discourse
Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987,Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors.Cognitive Science21. 247-282) while in the experimental psycholinguisti…
Social network cohesion and the retreat from Southern vowels in Raleigh
Network research in sociolinguistics suggests that integration in a local community network promotes speakers' retention of local linguistic variants in the context of pressure from external or standard dialects. In most sociolinguistic network research, a speaker is assigned a single score along an index representing the aggregate of several network and other social features. We propose that contemporary network methods in adjacent disciplines c…
Language Variation and Social Networks
The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of …
Supraregional Changes Are Uncorrelated
Research Article| December 01 2021 6. Supraregional Changes Are Uncorrelated: A Community Comparison Robin Dodsworth; Robin Dodsworth robin dodsworth is professor of English in the linguistics program at North Carolina State University. Her research investigates sociolinguistic variation, especially as it relates to socioeconomic and social network characteristics. Her 2020 book, coauthored with Richard Benton, is entitled Language Variation and …
Linguistic Employment Niches: Southern Dialect across Industries
The authors examine how linguistic niches may develop in certain industries. Using acoustic measurement techniques, the authors examine the extent to which workers in different industries display dialect features associated with the American South. The data are drawn from 190 semistructured sociolinguistic interviews from 2008 to 2017. Six linguistic variables were constructed to measure dialect features associated with southern American English.…
T d/ Releases are strengthening among White speakers: Evidence from a large-scale acoustic study of English in Raleigh
The release and aspiration of word-final /t/ and /d/ are important sociolinguistic variables in American English because they have strong, contextually driven indexicality. Word-final /t d/ releases are usually coded impressionistically due to the absence of automated methods for identifying prepausal release bursts or aspiration. This paper introduces an automated method for identifying released tokens prepausally and for measuring phonetic prop…
Linguistic Variation and Morphology (15 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (8 works) · Psychology (7 works)