Where is the Surfer? Where is the Hipster?: Spatial Relations in Southern Californian English vs. Pacific Northwest English

When searching for a map that represents the regional American English dialects, there is no ignoring that the West is an under-researched region of the United States. Maps such as the Labov et al. (2005) map from the Atlas of North American English are in great need of an update. Although some American regional dialect maps such as Delaney (2000) go further than the Labov et al. (2005) in splitting the West, there is still more research that needs to be done. Fortunately more recent research has been done (see D'Onofrio et al. 2016, Crosby and Dalola 2020) in distinguishing dialectal differences of West Coast English, specifically on the basis of vowels. However, in this presentation I will be adding to this effort of distinguishing West Coast English varieties in a semantic way, by comparing spatial (topological) relations of Californian English and Pacific Northwest English. More specifically, this presentation focuses on speakers from Los Angeles, California and Seattle, Washington, in hopes that choosing participants from two ends of the West Coast will show more variation in the responses. 

This presentation follows that of previous literature by Levinson and Meira (2003) on spatial language, focusing on figure-ground relations. A figure-ground (FG) relation is where one entity, the figure, is being located in relation to another - often physically larger - entity, the ground (Bowerman & Pederson 1992). For example, in the phrase “the apple is on the table” apple is the figure entity that is being located in relation to the ground entity table. Figure-ground relations have been researched and discussed extensively in non-English languages, so this paper aims to take those same cross-linguistic approaches and apply them in researching English dialects. Just as Levinson and Meira (2003) show how topological relations vary quite a lot in different languages, I will show there is indeed some sort of a variation between Californian English and Pacific Northwest English FG relations. To show this, I used the BowPed (Bowerman & Pederson 1992) topological relation pictures series to elicit FG relation responses. Using this set of stimuli, the presentation discusses responses from 10 speakers, five born and raised in the Los Angeles area, and five in the Seattle area. After eliciting, compiling, and organizing the FG relations given in each participant’s response, I found that there were 10 instances of split variation between the two regional dialects. The variation that is different falls on the preposition used in the FG relations (e.g. the boat is in the water vs. the boat is on the water). The 10 differing prepositions in the FG relations make an interesting addition to the discussion of American West Coast English regional dialects, and is something this project will be continuing to study.

This individual article from the Proceedings is published here.