Episode 7: Santiago Fieldwork 2015

This week consisted of putting my momma on a plane back to the US (*snif*), chugging along with my side studies (which I talk more about below), and 2 interviews from V neighborhood. I have also been trying to recruit & follow up with more folks in V neighborhood, and I have 5 interviews scheduled for next week, hurray!

A quick overview of this week, followed by some more detailed info below:

Monday: went up to the Universidad de los Andes, met with a colleague (a fellow linguist) who is helping me recruit some of his students that are from V neighborhood. Was supposed to have an interview in the afternoon, but got cancelled on, so my mom & I took advantage of the free afternoon to do the double decker bus tour :)

Tuesday: To the university for an interview. Tuesday night my mom left, and we had a lovely time chatting at the airport over one last pisco sour :)

Wednesday: To my original LP site, trying to plug some holes of the control perception study. Left a little early to catch up on work that I’d been ignoring while my mom was here :)

Thursday: University, plugging some holes & got another interview.

Friday: LP site, there was a job fair going on in the plaza next to the site, so I decided to be brave & go cold recruit over there. I was really proud of myself, and I got several people to help fill some of my control study holes!

Totals:

Interviews: 39/60

Control perception study: LP: 11/15, V: 0/15

Picture study: 16/30

Voice perception study: 0/30

The interviews (which also include the biggest perception study) are my top priority. However, if people email me, or other people want to participate, anyone can participate in the Picture Study. Essentially, I’m doing this study to confirm the perceptions that I myself had about the pictures I selected for use in the Original Perception study. These pictures are supposed to represent younger & older males & females from working & professional classes (in total, 8 pictures). In general, my perceptions have been confirmed (though I’ll back that up with some numbers in the actual published paper lolz). Many parts of my study are based off of Hay, Warren, and Drager (2006), which investigated vowel shifts in New Zealand English.

In other news, I felt vindicated on Thursday as I overheard the following dialogue between a male & a female speaker, as I was waiting to cross the street:

A: Y tu[Ø] papá[Ø]?

B: Mi papá?

A: O sea tu mamá y tu papá?

--> Turns out the first turn was plural ("and your parents?"), so these speakers had to negotiate to understand meaning!!!!! Instead of just saying something like, “no, tuS papáS,” speaker A [male] decided to circumlocute :)

This is good for me, because one of the ‘shakier’ parts of my motivation for doing this study about disappearing /s/s in Chilean Spanish is that eventually, loss of /s/ may lead to confusion (i.e. not knowing how many things your interlocutor is referring to), so some other marker of plurality is necessary to avoid interlocutor confusion. My hypothesis is that some sort of marker on the final vowel of the word will be this confusion-solver, whether it be: an elongated last vowel, a breathier last vowel, or perhaps a change in vowel quality (its pronunciation).

Native speakers have told me that this doesn’t happen very often, but clearly, it does happen! Vindication station :)

I’ve had some speakers, particularly following the perception task, tell me that they’ve been confused at times about the plurality of an item/topic, and that they listen for ‘lengthening’ or ‘intonation’ of the last part of the word (i.e. the vowel). I can’t wait to see what my data say about that!

Lessons learned/challenges faced this week:

1. I am indebted to my friends at my sites in LP. I would never have been able to get all my interviews in this neighborhood so quickly without them.

2. Recruiting in V neighborhood is really hard. People are less open & less likely to want to talk to a stranger. I’m trying to use my snowball/friend-of-a-friend method up there like it’s my job (lolz), but particularly in the oldest demographic, it’s really tough. I am hoping to be to 50 by the time my boyfriend Justin arrives (11/20, woo!). This coming week, on Tuesday & Thursday mornings, I’m meeting with 2 groups of older folks in that neighborhood, and hopefully I’ll be my shining-est, convincing-est self, so that they’ll want to participate.

3. Public transit can be a real bummer, particularly at peak hours, particularly in the upper-crust neighborhoods where it’s assumed that most folks have cars. I was 30 minutes late to my Monday morning appointment because FOUR full buses went by without stopping. Sigh.

I’ve been here for just over 8 weeks, and I have just under 7 to finish everything up. I am feeling good, but will feel even better when I’m done :)

Thanks for reading!