26.1467, Review: Cog Sci; Phonetics; Phonology; Psycholing; Socioling: Celata, Calamai (2014)

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Subject: 26.1467, Review: Cog Sci; Phonetics; Phonology; Psycholing; Socioling: Celata, Calamai (2014)

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Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:45:40
From: Christopher Strelluf [cstrell at nwmissouri.edu]
Subject: Advances in Sociophonetics

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2819.html

EDITOR: Chiara  Celata
EDITOR: Silvia  Calamai
TITLE: Advances in Sociophonetics
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Variation 15
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Christopher Strelluf,  

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

_Advances in Sociophonetics_ carves a place for itself in the emerging field
of sociophonetics by presenting a small collection of engaging articles that
examine a diverse range of phonetic variables in several European languages,
while also suggesting broader theoretical and methodological directions for
sociophoneticians. Editors Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai suggest in their
introduction that the book “addresses hot themes” and “proposes a fresh look
at old problems,” and in doing so distinguishes itself from the textbooks
(e.g., Di Paolo and Yaeger-Dror 2011; Thomas 2011) and journal special issues
(e.g., Jannedy and Hay 2006) that currently make up much of the field’s
literature (1). These inquiries are taken up in seven chapters contributed by
sociophonetic practitioners.

In addition to providing the expected overview of the works in the collection,
Celata and Calamai’s introduction offers a definition of sociophonetics as a
“privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change”
that, in combining theoretical and analytic techniques from phonetics and
sociolinguistics, “allows the researchers to disentangle step by step the role
of individual factors [...] in the multidimensional space of speech variation”
(2). They note the frequent interaction between sociophonetics and Exemplar
Theory that results from the massive amounts of fine-grained data that may be
assembled by sociophonetic techniques—datasets that parallel “the vast amount
of speech variation experienced daily by children acquiring their native
language and adult hearers and speakers” (2). In offering these points of
synthesis, Celata and Calamai are, in a sense, reflecting the general
characterization of sociophonetics as a combination of measurement techniques
and statistical approaches from phonetics with sociolinguistics’ emphasis on
collecting “natural” speech. In another sense, though, they create space to
orient the large datasets of sociophonetics toward broader theoretical
examinations of phonology, language processing, and language acquisition.

The emphasis on such issues is immediately clear in Chapter 1, “The
sociophonetic orientation of the language learner” by William Labov. The short
essay presents findings from a number of studies that will be familiar to
readers of Labov’s major works, but does so within the context of
sociophonetics. Citing studies of phonetic and phonological change in
Philadelphia, Milton Keynes, Papua New Guinnea, New England, Montreal, and New
York City, Labov notes that, with rare exceptions, children overwhelmingly
reject the language of their parents in favor of emerging community norms.
This summary presentation offers a brief but impressive answer to questions
that Labov has been exploring for a half century--namely, the question of the
individual speaker’s relationship to the linguistic community. Based on the
evidence presented here, Labov firmly concludes that the community is prior to
the individual, and that while sociophonetic methods will yield giant pools of
data that reveal patterns in subgroups of a population, the ultimate aim of
sociophonetic studies should be to identify larger community patterns in
language change.

Chapter 2, “French liaison and the lexical repository” by Bernard Laks,
Basilio Calderone, and Chiara Celata, shifts focus to using massive databases
to examine a single variable. Drawing on the 900,000-word “Phonologie du
Francais Contemporain” (PFC) corpus, the authors count occurrences of French
liaison. Liaison occurs when a word-final consonant (which would normally not
be pronounced) is followed by a word-initial vowel, and the consonant is
pronounced as a link between words (e.g., “les amis” ‘the friends’ will
include the liaison [z] between “les” and “amis”). They count 16,805
occurrences of liaison in 3,105 environments in the PFC. The environments show
a power-law distribution, meaning that a small number of types constitute the
vast majority of occurrences of liaison. This has implications for lexical
storage--since these low-frequency types could not be memorized, speakers must
be storing orthography and applying a generalized liaison rule. Further, as
liaison occurrences are counted by consonant type and by social
characteristics of speakers, they generally continue to show power-law
distributions. However, a few distributional differences do emerge among
low-frequency types based on speaker educational level, suggesting the
possibility of a social interaction with the variable. This raises the broader
methodological possibility that variables that appear to be categorical in
high-frequency environments may show variation in lower frequency
environments.

In Chapter 3, “Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey,”
Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson, and James M. Scobbie offer a sweeping
examination of coda /r/. While Scottish English is typically thought of as
rhotic, the authors note occurrences of a range of productions from a trill to
full /r/ loss. The range of productions, combined with various patterns of
apparent social stratification begs questions of both the phonetic nature of
derhoticization and how to describe its complexity. To attempt to address
these questions, the authors examine /r/ by 1) impressionistic coding by three
transcribers, 2) spectrogram analysis of minimal pairs, and 3) ultrasound
tongue imaging. The third technique, which is likely the least familiar to
researchers, allows the researchers to establish acoustic correlates for (and
contradictions to) the articulatory gestures coded in auditory transcription
and for the formant measurements captured in Praat. They conclude that
derhoticization in their data “resulted from /r/ articulated with a tongue-tip
raised gesture” that is connected with working class speakers, and creates a
contrast from bunched-tongue articulations that correspond to the strongest
instances of postvocalic /r/ (85). In addition to analyzing spontaneous and
prompted tokens of coda /r/, the authors examine articulation of /r/ where
speakers are mimicking derhoticized speech, and find that the articulatory
basis of derhoticization creates auditory ambiguities even for Scottish
English speakers who are themselves derhoticizing. This broad set of
approaches allows them to identify fine-grained social differences in
productions and perceptions of /r/. From these, they ultimately argue that
exemplar memory must contain social category information that is both
independent of and interrelated with phonological information (89-90). 

Rosalind A.M. Temple turns to arguably the most-studied variables in English
in Chapter 4, “Where and what is (t,d)? A case study in taking a step back in
order to advance sociophonetics.” Using data from the York Corpus of British
English, she suggests that (t,d) deletion might be explained as a function of
Connected Speech Processes (CSPs) rather than of morphosyntactic constraints
(99). She begins her study by closely detailing the variety of potential
instances of release and lenition of word-final stops. Of note, Temple
provides several spectrograms (and many more, along with audio files, on the
publisher’s website; see “evaluation” below), which can help shift analysis of
(t,d) deletion toward subtle instrumental analysis, rather than categorical
impressionistic coding. She notes parallels between the GoldVarb analysis of
phonological contexts for (t,d) deletion and other studies of CSPs to suggest
that CSP explanations (e.g., overlapping gestures, articulatory effort)
sufficiently account for (t,d) deletion. She provides further evidence from
lenitions by glottalization, devoicing of /d/, assimilation to labials and
velars, and affrication that CSPs account for (t,d) deletion and, moreover,
that /t/ and /d/ follow the same patterns as other word-final stops (at least
in British English; Temple is explicit that her analysis does not apply to, in
particular, African American English). In discussion, Temple notes that, while
CSPs can explain (t,d) deletion, realizations of /t/ and /d/ remain a resource
available to speakers for discursive purposes. The wide variety of
realizations of word-final stops argues for their interpretation as a gradient
variable rather than a categorical one, but a much larger dataset would be
necessary for reaching strong conclusions about the categoricity/gradience of
deletion.

The consideration of the phonological-phonetic interface in Chapter 4 gives
way to additional theoretical exploration in Chapter 5, Giovanna Marotta’s
“New parameters for the sociophonetic indexes: Evidence from the Tuscan
varieties of Italian.” Marotta describes six sociophonetic features of Tuscan
Italian and then offers a metaphor for characterizing them (and sociophonetic
variables in general) based on geometry. The metaphor categorizes
sociophonetic variables according to “shape,” “size,” “thickness,” and
“weight.” Shape corresponds to “the description of a given phonological
alternation” (146). Size is “the degree of pervasiveness of the process in the
phonological system,” as in whether a given phonological alternation affects
many segments in a language or just a few (153). Thickness is “the degree of
control the speaker may have on his/her production” of a variable (154).
Weight describes social evaluation; Marotta likens it to sociolinguistics uses
of the term “prestige” (156). Shape and size are descriptive of the linguistic
system itself, thickness descriptive of speaker productions, and weight
descriptive of social evaluation. Marotta notes that these metaphors are
advantageously “distinctive and independent” from one another, and can help
tease apart factors in sociolinguistic variation that are otherwise collapsed
together in analysis (162).

Rosanna Sornicola and Silvia Calamai contribute “Sound archives and linguistic
variation: The case of the Phlegraean diphthongs” as Chapter 6. Noting the
potential importance of sound archives for sociophoneticians, they describe
the construction of “Archivio dei dialetti campani” (ADICA) as a collection of
dialects from the Campania dialects of Italy. They pay particular attention to
the “centrality of the individual,” a priority that marks Continental European
sociolinguistic approaches as distinct from the multidimensional variation
approaches that often dominate Anglo-American sociolinguistics (172-174). They
use ADICA to examine the diphthongization of /e/ in Phlegraean dialects.
Previous research has characterized variations as “spontaneous,” and the
authors note a series of structural and dialectological challenges that
Phlegraean diphthongization poses for accurate description. They list the wide
ranges of phonetic productions for /e/ recorded from three speakers from the
island of Ischia—however, despite major inter-speaker differences, a small
subset of common productions suggests “crucial evidence of the importance of
the prosodic components of stress” (180). They further suggest correlations
between diphthongization and duration, pitch, and loudness in Phlegraean, but
not with the syntactic position of focus that has been noted in other Italian
dialects. Their analysis of order within a process that appears to be highly
unstable bespeaks the value of spontaneous speech dialect archives for
studying sociophonetic variation and change.

Chapter 7, Adrian Simpson’s “Ejectives in English and German: Linguistic,
sociophonetic, interactional, epiphenomenal?” concludes the volume. Simpson
describes the few existing accounts of English ejectives, but suggests their
occurrence is becoming more common. Still, ejectives appear to be so
infrequent that, in three hours of _The Office_, Simpson identifies only eight
occurrences. One Suffolk English speaker is measured with electroglottography.
She produces ejectives as well as pulmonically released plosives. These
various articulations lead Simpson to examine epiphenomenal ejectives that
occur in German, which, she suggests, are likely a result of a pulmonically
fueled airburst rather than a movement of the larynx. A similar explanation
seems to account for some of the acoustic evidence Simpson provided for the
Suffolk speaker. These allow the research to define two means for producing
ejectives in English: “one in which pulmonic airflow leads to a build-up of
intraoral pressure, the other in which true glottalic initiation is used,
using larynx-raising to compress the air trapped in the supraglottal cavity”
(201). This analysis of a strikingly rare feature of English again calls
attention to the value of close phonetic analysis of massive databases.

EVALUATION

_Advances in Sociophonetics_ is a welcome contribution to sociophonetic
research. It is distinct from existing literature in the field on a number of
levels, including its general focuses on consonants rather than vowels, on
European languages rather than American Englishes, and on contributors’
explorations into more abstract questions of phonology and cognition rather
than on presentations of large sets of data. The text is challenging, and
rewards close reading with insights into the types of questions that
sociophoneticians might ask about language and the types of contributions that
sociophonetics might make to linguistic theory.

_Advances in Sociophonetics_ will indeed be best appreciated by scholars who
are already committed to sociophonetic approaches--especially because there
have been relatively few venues to this point that have created space for
focusing on theories of sociophonetics. Advanced graduate students will also
find many of the chapters helpful as they begin to consider their research
programs--especially if they might be able to design projects on the model of
some of Stuart et al.’s approaches to /r/ loss or if they have access to
massive databases like the PFC, ADICA, or the York corpus. In the vein of
exposure to new variables and new techniques, Chapters 3 and 4 are especially
commendable for the collection of audio and video files that are available on
the publisher’s website. The ability to hear and see the productions being
described in the text adds substantial clarity to understanding the
articulatory variations under investigation. For a discipline that is
concerned with close phonetic detail, presentations that allow researchers to
access actual productions must become the gold standard of the literature.  

Readers who are not versed in sociophonetics--and even sociophoneticians who
are unfamiliar with the language varieties being discussed in individual
chapters--may at first find _Advances in Sociophonetics_ difficult to
approach. Though all contributors provide data from very fine-grained phonetic
analyses, most chapters do not provide findings from the massive
conglomerations of data that many sociophoneticians may expect. Rather,
contributors often refer to such findings that have been published elsewhere
so that they can move more quickly to broader theoretical and methodological
considerations or to very narrow descriptions of articulations. While the
collection is an appropriate space for such explorations, the approach at
times makes it difficult to understand exactly what sorts of variations are at
stake in a language or how widespread an occurrence of a variable is. The
approach also does not afford many opportunities to find correlations between
productions and social factors, at least in the ways that may be expected by
researchers working in Anglo-American sociolinguistic traditions.

_Advances in Sociophonetics_ also leaves space for future sociophonetic
collections. One notable omission from this collection is studies that make
use of the massive databases that automated vowel measurement programs (e.g.,
FAVE--Rosenfelder, Fruehwald, Evanini and Yuan 2011) have made available. And
while _Advances in Sociophonetics_ will introduce readers to sociophonetic
variables in a number of Western European languages, the absence of languages
from elsewhere in the world makes it clear that infinite amounts of
sociophonetic territory remain to be explored. These are not weaknesses of
this text so much as indications of the need for continued support for
publication in sociophonetic research.

REFERENCES

Di Paolo, Marianna and Yaeger-Dror, Malcah (eds.). 2011. _Sociophonetics: A
student’s guide_. London: Routledge.

Jannedy, Stefanie and Hay, Jennifer. 2006. Modeling sociophonetic variation.
_Journal of Phonetics_ 34(4). 405-408.

Labov, William. 1972. _Sociolinguistic patterns_. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.

Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Fruehwald, Joe, Evanini, Keelan and Yuan, Jiahong. 2011.
FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite.
http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christopher Strelluf is Assistant Professor of English at Northwest Missouri
State University. His dissertation, _“We have such a normal, non-accented
voice”: A sociophonetic study of English in Kansas City_, is available at
http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/cstrell/kc_speech.htm



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