PAULA DEEN IS TOO INTENSE FOR ME

here is a report on her for my psycholinguistics class i recently did.
















American English in the Southern Dialect, as Represented by Chef Paula Deen


Jessica Seid
PSY 531, Nelson
Summer 2008







Transcription 1: Appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, April 2008 on special location at Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida.
Speakers: E, Ellen DeGeneres, TV personality and comedienne. P, Paula Deen, TV personality and chef specializing in Southern cuisine.

E: Um, did you go ride anything after that?
P: I rode—Yes. I rode the scariest ride, y’all. I rode the merry-go-round with Jack.
E: Oh no.
P: Yes. And I…I got drunk.
E: Uh huh.
P: I got drunk! Heh heh heh!
E: Not on purpose.
P: Not on purpose! No, I was lookin’ all around and I’m standin’ up there holdin’ on ta Jack and I said, “Jack, granny is gettin’ drunk.”
E: Yeah.
P: Haha heh heh heh!
(Ellen and Paula laugh, audience applauses, cheers)
P: So I had ta only look at Jack b’cause it made me, it made me so swimmy-headed. But this afternoon after tha show, Jack ‘n Jamie ‘n Brooke, and Pepaw, Michael, who is gunna take Jack to one uh the, that place where all the rides are fuh little people…?
E: Uh huh, that’ll be fun!
P: Thas where I’m goin’.
E: That’s fun. And what about the…I would think that you’re a connoisseur of food, and since theme parks are known for their food, what do ya thank of the food here?
P: Oh my gosh I adore the food here, Ellen. Last night we went ta Univer—You know, through tha park and I got me a big o’ turkey leg.
E: Mmhmm.
P: It was so delicious. And then I had the funnel cake with the fish—fresh strawberries from Plant City, Florida y’all—they are to die for!
P: With vanilla ice cream and it was fabulous. So that was my supper.

Introduction
The Food Network’s resident Southern cuisine chef Paula Deen is known for her expertise in cooking Southern food. Having published four successful cookbooks and owning her own restaurant in addition to having several shows on the Food Network, something noticeable about Deen is her thick English dialect. Deen’s language usage and dialect is noted in her second appearance ever on the Ellen DeGeneres show when speaking naturally in response to questions fielded to her by DeGeneres. Deen was on the show to promote her newest cookbook with recipes from her sons, which came out in April of 2008. Deen was born in Albany, Georgia and currently resides in Savannah, Georgia, which is also the city where her successful restaurant, Lady and Sons is also located.
Concepts and Context
Dialects exist regionally; they are variants of a language characterized by its unique vocabulary, grammar and, pronunciation (phonology). It is recognized by other native speakers of the language as understandable, but is considered different. In the US, prominent dialects originate from the East coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South. The southern dialect and its idiosyncrasies will be examined.
The southern American English dialect could also be considered a sociolect, a dialect characteristic of a particular social class. “Southern drawl” is a term often used to describe people who speak the dialect; it has a negative connotation on how speakers articulate the sounds of words to sound like there is very little enunciation, and it has very close history with the African American Vernacular English, as most slaves were African Americans working on plantations in the South.

Analysis
“Y’all” is a phrase that Deen tends to use frequently in her vernacular. This aspect of Southern American English grammar is a contraction of words “you” and “all” in the second person plural. “Y’all” is a multi-purpose pronoun, with the ability to be used in a group setting or be combined with the word “all” to augment a sense of familiarity and closeness. Commonly it is mistakenly thought that “y’all” can be used as a singular pronoun a plural pronoun. In the transcript, there is never a use of “y’all” in the singular form. Deen uses “y’all” to address the audience of DeGeneres’ show and couples DeGeneres in that term. “Y’all” is a characteristic of more modern Southern American English, stemming from the original dialects of the states that seceded from the Confederate States of America at the time of the Civil War.
Another feature of Deen’s talk is the incomplete enunciation of the morpheme /ing/. Deen tends to drop the /g/ phone. As in “lookin’”, “standin’”, and so on. This is consistent with Southern American English components such as adding extra phonemic sounds to words, or lacking distinction between vowel sounds. Deen also fails to completely enunciate the words “the”, “for”, and “to”. Instead, she says “tha”, “fuh”, and “ta”, respectively. Her incomplete pronunciation of these words has to do with sound articulation, or how words are pronounced through the respiratory, the laryngeal, and/or the vocal tract. Studying how Southern American English is, there is no concrete reason as to why these words are pronounced this way, but these sounds are produced with the custom shaping of the vocal tract when words are uttered with aspiration. The pronunciations are likely to have evolved from African American Vernacular English pronunciations, and AAVE itself stemmed from the coasts of Africa.
Deen also interjects regional lexicon of the South as well as her own personal words during her appearance on the show. In the beginning of the transcript, Deen claims of getting “drunk” off of a merry-go-round, and in context, the meaning of “drunk” most likely means “dizzy”. “Swimmy-headed” is another phrase Deen uses to describe her sensations felt from riding the merry-go-round, which also probably means a feeling of dizziness. “Pepaw” is a regional term for “grandfather”, a variant of original term “papaw”, as both are terms of endearment. Deen uses this term because she mainly talked about her grandson Jack and used his relationship to him as a reason to utter “pepaw”. “Supper” is a dated term for an evening meal, or dinner.
Deen’s Southern Georgian accent can be seen as a sociolect considering she hails from that region and her speech is thick with a Southern accent. She speaks slowly, with laughter littered throughout her discourse. Looking at Deen’s speech as a sociolect makes her seem less credible as a chef; her conversation is often sidetracked with stories of what she experienced that has nothing to do with the subject at hand, coupled along with speaking slowly with pauses, false starts, and speech errors. This speaking behavior can be witnessed on her various cooking shows broadcasted on the Food Network. Throughout her appearance on the Ellen Degeneres Show, Deen seemed to be dominating talk most of the time, giving host DeGeneres less time to interrupt Deen and ask her other questions. This made Deen seem slightly uncouth, and unaware of pragmatics, committing a social faux pas. Something odd Deen did was addressing the entire audience of the show, versus speaking to DeGeneres directly, which is fairly unconventional for a talk show (despite both the host and the guest having knowledge of a present audience). Southern American speech likes to be in the second person, as if to include others in an experience and therefore appear more outgoing and friendly.

Conclusion
Paula Deen is the perfect person to study when looking at Southern American English as a dialect. She has a “coastal Southern” accent that is non-rhotic (adding or dropping a /r/ sound before consonants in a word). Her vocabulary is flush with lexicon characteristic of Southern American English; she uses phrases like “y’all”, and drops the phonemic sounds of certain words.
Her speech behavior can be examined as a sociolect. Some mannerisms she carries while speaking is telling of a certain socio-economic status; at times her overzealousness to talk could be taken as being rude and being unaware of social rules, thus giving the idea that someone isn’t educated. Friendliness and “Southern hospitality” is something that the South is known for, and the second person voice of Southern American English alludes to inclusion and openness, to be amicable.