31.59, Calls: Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics/Trinidad and Tobago

Sat Jan 4 05:36:22 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-59. Sat Jan 04 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.59, Calls: Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics/Trinidad and Tobago

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Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:35:54
From: Philipp Meer [philipp.meer at uni-muenster.de]
Subject: Panel at SCL 2020: Sociophonetics in the Caribbean

Full Title: Panel at SCL 2020: Sociophonetics in the Caribbean 

Date: 03-Aug-2020 - 09-Aug-2020
Location: St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago 
Contact Person: Philip Meer
Meeting Email: philipp.meer at uni-muenster.de
Web Site: https://tinyurl.com/wgl493p 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics; Phonology; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2020 

Meeting Description:

Sociophonetic research in the Caribbean: New perspectives and (digital)
initiatives

Panel at SCL 2020 Trinidad & Tobago (2nd Biennial Conference of the Society
for Caribbean Linguistics, August 3-9, 2020)

Sociolinguistic research on phonetic and phonological variation in Caribbean
English-lexicon Creoles/Englishes (as well as other Caribbean languages) has a
long tradition (see e.g. Winford 1972; Rickford 1979 for early studies). Early
sociolinguistic research employed auditory phonetic approaches in analyzing
variation; similarly, recent sociolinguistic studies have also relied on
perceptual analyses (e.g. Wilson 2014; Irvine-Sobers 2018). In the last decade
or so, however, there has also been an upsurge of sociophonetic studies that
primarily draw on acoustic phonetic data and approaches (e.g. Rosenfelder
2009; Leung 2013; Kraus 2017; Ahlers & Meer 2019) or a combination of
instrumental and auditory approaches (e.g. Lacoste 2012; Westphal 2017). Such
studies have often revealed fine-grained variation patterns or provided
empirical substantiation of earlier impressionistic work. They have thus been
a welcome contribution to our understanding of phonetic and phonological
variation in the Caribbean.

Given recent advancements in the fields of speech processing, new avenues for
sociophonetic research on Caribbean English Creoles/Englishes (and other
Caribbean languages) can be identified. Firstly, while new forced alignment
techniques (e.g. Gorman et al. 2011; Kisler et al. 2017; McAuliffe et al.
2017) allow for phonetic analyses of much larger datasets, most sociophonetic
studies of Caribbean Creoles/Englishes have relied on manual segmentation
(notwithstanding recent exceptions; e.g. Kraus 2017; Ahlers & Meer 2019).
Secondly, while (semi-)automatic procedures for vowel formant prediction
(Escudero et al. 2009; Morrison & Nearey 2011), including Bayesian methods
(Rosenfelder et al. 2014), have recently been proposed, sociophonetic studies
on vowels in Caribbean English Creoles/ Englishes have largely not made use of
those but often favored manual and/or script-based vowel formant extraction
(but see Meer & Matute Flores 2018; Meer 2019). A higher degree of
automatization during data processing and analysis, however, may allow for
analyses of larger Caribbean speech corpora and help reduce issues of
comparability and reproducibility.

Moreover, not unlike in the field of sociophonetics overall, acoustic studies
on Caribbean English Creoles/Englishes have predominantly focused on vowels
(Rosenfelder 2009; Leung 2013; Kraus 2017). Acoustic evidence on
sociolinguistic variation at the consonantal (Ahlers & Meer 2019) or prosodic
level (Leung & Deuber 2014), in contrast, is rare. Furthermore, despite there
being a number of studies focusing on acoustic aspects of variation in vowels,
most of these studies (notwithstanding some exceptions; e.g. Kraus 2017; Meer
2019) use static steady-state formant measures and a binary distinction
between monophthongs and diphthongs without taking into consideration
vowel-inherent spectral change, i.e. vowel formant dynamics. Additionally, as
almost all the above studies primarily focus on speech production, more
research is needed that investigates sociophonetic variation in terms of
speech perception.

Call for Papers:

To address these issues, this panel aims to bring together researchers working
on sociophonetic variation in Caribbean English Creoles/Englishes (and other
languages spoken in the Caribbean), particularly in conjunction with one or
more of the following aspects:

- the use of forced alignment and/or automatic vowel formant prediction
techniques 
- acoustic approaches to sociophonetic variation at the consonantal level
- acoustic approaches to sociophonetic variation at the prosodic level
- acoustic analyses of vowels that take into account vowel-inherent spectral
(rate of) change/vowel formant dynamics (possibly in addition to steady-state
formant measures)
- sociophonetic studies concerned with speech perception (in addition to
production)

Similar to general sessions at SCL, the panel will consist of full papers,
which will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation (plus 10 minutes
discussion). 

The deadline for submission of abstracts is February 15, 2020. All abstracts
need to be anonymized and should indicate the panel (“Sociophonetic research
in the Caribbean: New perspectives and (digital) initiatives”) somewhere near
the abstract title. All abstracts should be no longer than 500 words
(excluding references and additional material) and include the following
sections: introduction, aim/research questions, method, (preliminary) results,
discussion, references. Additional material such as figures/tables are
welcome. All abstracts must be submitted via EasyAbs (see submission website
below) and will undergo peer review.

Conference Website (on Linguist List):
https://linguistlist.org/confservices/customhome.cfm?CFID=f72869b6-4093-4671-a
453-a1c723aa8dc7&CFTOKEN=0&emeetingid=5702JA44587E5A5A406050441

Submission Website (EasyAbs):
https://linguistlist.org/confservices/EasyAbs/customabssub.cfm?Emeetingid=5702
JA44587E5A5A406050441

Convenor: Philipp Meer (University of Münster & State University of Campinas),
philipp.meer at uni-muenster.de

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