Alessa Farinella will present her research at the HFA Days Graduate Student Expo on March 27. The title of her talk is Inter- and intra- speaker variability in “BIN” utterances in African American English”. See the abstract below.

Inter- and intra- speaker variability in “BIN” utterances in African American English 
In African American English, one way of expressing the remote past is with a construction sometimes referred to as “stressed BIN” (Rickford 1973, 1975). For example, a sentence like “Mae been announcing the winners” could mean that Mae is announcing the winners, and has been doing so for a long time. It has been reported that in order for this construction to express the remote past meaning, there must be higher pitch and intensity on the word “been.” However, it has also been claimed that there is much variability across and within speakers (Green et al. 2022). In this project, I characterize the phonetic variability in these types of utterances using data-driven pitch measurements. I demonstrate that speakers vary their pronunciation in systematic ways across the entire contour, and not just on the word expressing the remote past (i.e., “been”). Better understanding this variation in pronunciation can help us understand the relationship between these phonetic characteristics and the factors that condition them.