LURA 2019 0

Vowel Quality in Bohemian Rhapsody: Freddie Mercury vs. Rami Malek

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 20:56:36 +0000

Vowel Quality in Bohemian Rhapsody: Freddie Mercury vs. Rami Malek Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/19/2019 - 14:56

An actor charged with the job of believably capturing another person's idiolect is undertaking something enormous. But when that person has a legacy like Freddie Mercury's, the task may seem almost unsurmountable.

By Sophia Six
Course: Language Sound Structures (Ling 3100)
Advisor: Prof. Rebecca Scarborough
LURA 2019

In this research project for the course Language Sound Structures, I studied the difference in Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury’s idiolect (his personal habits of speech) compared to the accent actor Rami Malek uses in his impersonation of Mercury in the recent award-winning biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Freddie Mercury had a London accent subtly influenced by his Parsi background, whereas Malek grew up speaking a Southern Californian dialect, which currently seems to not be notably influenced by his Egyptian heritage. Malek also had to learn to speak with prosthetic teeth for the role, as Mercury was born with two extra sets of incisors. Malek does a spectacular job of taking on the character of Mercury and impersonating his style of speech, but I hypothesized that there would be subtle differences in vowel quality due to the different origin of each man. Freddie Mercury spoke very rapidly and casually, slurring many of his words together. Malek, on the other hand, had to speak very carefully throughout the film in order to navigate the unfamiliar prosthetic teeth while attempting to mimic an equally unfamiliar London accent (and probably did not prioritize including too many Parsi-influenced phonetic details). It is for this reason that I expected him to produce vowels in a more open-mouth or low-tongue position than Mercury, who often raised or deleted vowels entirely in his natural speech.

In order to go about testing my hypothesis, I gathered clips from the movie of Malek’s speech, made a list of 169 unique words he spoke, and tried to find instances in which Freddie Mercury spoke the same words in his interview clips. After making as many matches as I could and then narrowing down the data for clarity, sound quality, and expected usefulness, as well as ensuring I had sufficient samples of every English-occurring vowel, I ultimately came up with 34 good clips of word pairs being clearly enunciated by both speakers. From there, I could compare the two words by listening, but also by looking at a visual representation of the data in the form of a waveform and a spectrogram. For example, the word ‘play’:

The upper graph in the data is a waveform, showing the intensity of sound as it changes over time. The lower graph is a spectrogram, a more complex illustration of amplitude, frequency, and time. Marked on the graphs in red, you will see ‘F1’ and ‘F2’, which refer to formants—peaks in the sound amplitude at certain frequencies—illustrated as darker areas on the graph. This data can tell us a lot about vowel quality, which results from where in the mouth the tongue is positioned while it is being produced. During a lower, more open tongue position, F1 will appear higher on the spectrogram. A fronted vowel will show F2 higher, or further away from F1.

We can see in the data that in Rami Malek’s speech, although it is subtle, F1 is slightly higher compared to F1 in Freddie Mercury’s example, so he is producing a slightly more open vowel. Most notably, you can see from the higher F2 that Mercury’s vowel is much more fronted and becomes increasingly so over the course of the vowel’s production. This points to a diphthong that was not present in Malek’s speech.

When listening to the sound files, the difference in diphthongization of the vowel is truly striking. Malek produces something close to [pl̥ɛ], the /ɛ/ sound being similar to the vowel produced in ‘bed’. His vowel is more relaxed and his mouth remains open; you can hear the “softness” of it in the clip as he trails off.

Rami "Play"

Mercury, on the other hand, produces a very clear diphthong in [pl̥eɪ], the /eɪ/ being what you would hear in ‘gate’. He starts his vowel with his tongue in a central position, moving more to a higher, closed-mouth position with the progression of the sound. His sound is much more tense overall.

Freddie "Play"

While I am not an accent expert, this distinction was very surprising to me, as I would have expected to hear a tense diphthong like that from a speaker with an American dialect like Malek, as it is exactly the way I would produce the word in my own accent, but I would not expect it in a natural London dialect. This led me to believe that there are more details in Mercury’s speech than I thought that are influenced by either his Parsi background or possibly by his time spent in America on tour.

Using this process of examination, I found that there were a few instances where Malek produced a more open vowel than Mercury would, as I had hypothesized, but ultimately, the examples were much fewer than I expected. In the 34 clips I chose, only 10 had a difference in pronunciation, 6 of those differences occurring on the vowel. Often, the difference in vowel quality was a more open vowel from Malek, as my hypothesis predicted, but overall he did a very good job imitating Mercury’s speech in his vowel production. For the most part, the two speakers were completely indistinguishable.

There were, however, some subtle features I discovered during my research besides the vowel contrast details I was looking for. For instance, Mercury sometimes had “creakiness” in his voice that Malek usually did not. I think this feature was a sort of style choice based on the context; for instance, when he punctuated a phrase with ‘darling,’ as he was wont to do, the intentional drop in pitch and subtle vocal fry perhaps sounded a bit more “cheeky.” He also spoke very quickly and casually, often significantly slurring his words, which led to many more deleted or raised vowels than Malek, who, very reasonably, spoke much more slowly and carefully in order to navigate the unfamiliar accent and prosthetics for the film. When he spoke quickly in this way, you could sometimes hear some retroflexed consonants sneak into his speech here and there, clearly artifacts from his Parsi upbringing.

As for Malek, the most interesting discovery I made about his speech was that he almost never deviated from a good and believable London accent, bringing none of his American dialect or personal idiolect details into the mix, but he did not attempt to imitate every subtle detail present in Mercury’s idiolect. While studying the unique details of Mercury’s idiolect was interesting in a multitude of ways, the strategies and motivations actors employ when portraying another famous or meaningful individual vary, and sometimes the detailed idiosyncrasies of a particular idiolect have to be sacrificed in favor of different mannerisms in order to carry the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Rami Malek did an excellent job taking on the challenge of embodying Freddie Mercury, through his motion, his mannerisms, his style, and perhaps in some ways most importantly, his unique voice.

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Doing Me an Educate: An Overview of Meme Linguistics

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 20:49:18 +0000

Doing Me an Educate: An Overview of Meme Linguistics Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/19/2019 - 14:49

Little scholarly research exists on the way language is used in memes, so we took matters into our own hands.

By Carolyn Olmsted and Cameron Sojak
Course: Morphology and Syntax (Ling 4420)
Advisor: Jared Desjardins
LURA 2019

For this paper that we researched for our Morphology and Syntax class, we hoped to look into a form of English language variation that is particularly relevant to college students today: memes. The internet is a vast place where language is constantly changing. Language patterns that you can’t go a day without seeing may be completely obsolete within weeks. Knowing this, we decided to study some constantly repeating patterns of language that have endured for relatively long periods of time—better known simply as memes—in order to get a better look at language use on the internet today.

We first looked at three different interesting patterns of morphology (the study of how meaning changes when you change a word): the construction of do as a dative form, verb agreement reduction, and the -o suffix. The dative “do” construction is most seen in pictures of animals, usually dogs, expressing an emotion. A common example is “you are doing me a frighten” overlaid on a picture of a frightened dog, as seen below:

This construction represents a valence-changing nominalization of the phrase “you are frightening me”. In the normal sentence, 'me' is a direct object, the receiver of a frightening. In "doing me a frighten", 'me' is upgraded to an indirect object, the receiver of 'a frighten' which the 'you' in the sentence is doing. Commonly, we see this construction used in languages like German or Russian, and while this new English version is not traditionally “grammatically correct”, it certainly has precedence in languages around the world.

The second pattern we considered is verb agreement reduction, whereby instead of saying a phrase like “he licks”, the -s suffix usually required in English is deleted to form he lick, often orthographically stylized as he licc. Other examples include he attacc, derived from “he attacks”, and he protecc, derived from “he protects”. In addition, a secondary property of this pattern is copula deletion, where a form of the verb be is deleted. This is used when the word after “he” (or she) in the pattern is an adjective or a noun, not a verb, but the same pattern is desired. In this case, the pattern is a reduced form of “he is thick” (specifically, he thick), and then again stylized as he thicc.

The final morphological pattern we looked at was the “-o” suffix, most commonly seen on the internet in the word doggo. The suffix has been used for quite some time as a common colloquializing/diminutive suffix (think pet names or nicknames) in Australian and British English, but until recently was not common in the United States. The pattern can be generally described as follows:

Xo[person with X characteristic] → X[adjective] -o

This pattern describes this change, "weirdo = weird+o" where you add the -o to the end of an adjective to create a new noun that means 'person who is adjective'. Most commonly online, we have also observed this pattern being extended to other animals (froggo and fisho have both often been used in my everyday life as an aquarium owner), but the pattern can also be seen in already existing English words such as weirdo, preggo, or sicko.

Considering syntax (how the placement of words in a sentence changes meaning), we looked at two different forms: what we call “doge” syntax and copula deletion (as already noted). “Doge” syntax comes from a popular picture of a Shiba Inu dog looking confused, surrounded by mismatching modifiers. Some examples would be “such awake”, “much morning”, or “many sunshine”, as seen below:

For this construction, the user takes a complement that is selectively restricted for the modifier and supplement that instead of the canonical complement. In other words, mismatching modifiers. In the example of 'many sunshine', the word 'many' usually precedes words in the category of 'plural countable nouns', many things. So, using a singular word like 'sunshine' is mismatched.

Returning again to copula deletion, this phenomenon is very common cross-linguistically; it happens in languages such as Russian and Arabic (in the present tense). Again, copula reduction is often simply a case of removing the word “is” or other form of the verb “to be”. An example we actually created ourselves was a picture of our lovely nominator’s dog, Nero, in a little sweater overlaid with the text “he cold”, which is a reduction of “he is cold”. This form is often used in conjunction with the verb agreement reduction form, as mentioned above, but can also be used on its own.

This pilot study only scratched the surface of novel morphological and syntactic forms being used on the internet, and further research would be needed to examine why these forms emerge or the contexts in which it is appropriate to use them. We might also consider other subjects of linguistic research. Many valid examples of common internet memes were not valuable for this particular research project because they have more pragmatic or semantic content than morphological content. Although even within our limited scope, we feel that this paper provides a valuable look into the grammar that has been coined online, and we certainly had a lot of fun writing it!

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Game of Linguistics

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 03:11:55 +0000

Game of Linguistics Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/18/2019 - 21:11

How did the biggest franchise in TV use linguistics to create a new universe?

By Lauren Nelsen
Course: Morphology and Syntax (Ling 4420)
Advisor: Jared Desjardins
LURA 2019

Game of Thrones, a hugely successful TV show, has firmly established its presence in popular culture. But it’s not just a show; it’s a constructed universe with different tribes and realistic constructed languages. One of these constructed languages, Dothraki, spoken by the Dothraki people, plays an integral role in the Game of Thrones experience.

Game of Thrones is one of the most successful TV franchises in the history of television. One of the reasons for the show’s success is the productions’ attention to detail throughout the series. The sets, costumes, characters, and dialogue carry immense depth that results in an immersive experience for the viewer. Along with these elements, the constructed languages

an invented language intended for human communication that has planned and cohesive phonological, grammatical, and syntactical systems

, or “con-langs”, used in the show have all the features of a real language. This linguistic depth provides a captivating and realistic element to the Game of Thrones universe, specifically for the Dothraki world. Dothraki, created by author and con-langer David J. Peterson, is one of the constructed languages created for the series. With an in-depth analysis of Dothraki’s linguistics features, like syntax

the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses)

, morphology

the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language

, and lexicon

the vocabulary of a language, an individual speaker or group of speakers, or a subject

, my project connects language to Dothraki culture, while highlighting how the use of this constructed language contributes to the overall Game of Thrones experience.

The Dothraki people are honest, direct, and brutal. These cultural characteristics are mirrored in Dothraki’s syntax. Dothraki does not have a copula, or “to be” verb, meaning sentences literally translate into /subject. adjective./. This structure allows for consistently short, direct sentences that perfectly mirror the Dothraki people’s tendency of forwardness.

Just like any language, Dothraki comes with a functional morphological system. Although the language is not heavily reliant on its morphological structure, it is an important aspect of Dothraki linguistics. Dothraki utilizes some interesting idiosyncrasies in its morphology. For example, the circumfix /-sa(v) / _ /-alat/ is attached to nouns to indicate that the subject is “covered in” that noun. For example, the word ‘blood’ /qoy/ becomes ‘covered in blood’ /saqoyalat/ after the circumfix is applied. This morphological feature allows nouns to be contextualized and lexically shifted by speakers, adding even more depth to the language.

Dothraki’s rich lexicon is the most salient feature of the language, because of its direct relationship with the culture. The original Game of Thrones books, written by George R.R. Martin, contain a few Dothraki words, but did not have a developed syntactic or morphological structure. This means that the language was entirely birthed from several nouns specific to Dothraki lifestyle and values. For example, because the Dothraki people worship horses, there are more than 8 words for ‘horse’ in Dothraki. The absence of certain words also plays a key role in the believability of the language. For example, there is no word for “thank you” in Dothraki. According to creator David J. Peterson, the absence of this term is due to the fact that the Dothraki people do not engage in trade. Because “thank you” is commonly used during the exchange of items, the term never came to fruition in Dothraki. Dothraki’s noun inventory is a reflection of the most important aspects of Dothraki life, while the absence of certain terms mirrors the isolationist practices of Dothraki culture. The lexicon is an imperative piece of the language, as it captures Dothraki’s most valued cultural elements and channels them to the viewer via linguistics.

Not only does Dothraki sound like an actual language, it is an actual language, because it includes major linguistics components, like morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Without these features, the language would seem artificial, removing the viewer from the scene. The syntax provides a consistent structure for the language, the morphology allows words to be utilized in different contexts, while the lexicon captures the most important elements of Dothraki life. Each Dothraki scene in Game of Thrones contains all the components of a realistic universe: functional costumes, believable settings, and complex characters. Despite the realism of these elements, they are merely visual and not tangible for the viewer. This is why language is so imperative, as it adds an auditory and functional component to the show. Syntax, morphology, and lexicon beautifully coexist, while simultaneously working together to create the Dothraki language. These linguistic features appear to be just technicalities, but with a closer look, they undeniably play a fundamental role in the Game of Thrones universe, and in the show’s momentous success.

Opening photo credit
Photo courtesy of The Daily Dot

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