Linguists are able to describe, transcribe, and classify the differences and similarities between accents formally and precisely, but there has until very recently been no reliable and objective way of measuring degrees of difference. It is one thing to say how varieties are similar, but quite another to assess how similar they are. On the other hand, there has recently been a strong focus in historical linguistics on the development of quantitative methods for comparing and classifying languages; but these have tended to be applied to problems of language family membership, at rather high levels in the family tree, not down at the level of individual accents. In this article, we outline our attempts to address the question of relative similarity of accents using quantitative methods. We illustrate our method for measuring phonetic similarity in a sample of cognate words for a number of (mainly British) varieties of English, and show how these results can be displayed using newer and more innovative network diagrams, rather than trees. We consider some applications of these methods in tracking ongoing changes in English and beyond, and discuss future prospects.1 How are accents different; and how different are accents?In November 2004, the BBC commissioned an online poll on attitudes to accents, as part of the 'Voices' project (which more generally explored 'how we speak in the UK now'). The fact that over 5,000 responses were received shows how interested speakers of English are in each others' accents; and the results and comments make fascinating reading (http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/poll_results.shtml, accessed 13 September 2006). Part of the fascination, however, lies in the opacity of many of the comments, which are difficult to interpret in phonetic terms, as shown in (1).(1) (a) I don't really like the Birmingham accent that much (even though I've got one), but I do like the Black Country Accent . . . It sounds singy and old-fashioned. (S. Murphy, Birmingham) (b) Yorksher accent and more specifically 'ull accent rules!. (red badger, 'ull) (c) I never notice my accent until someone points it out and the way we shorten words and the rs we sound here in Bristol. (Debbie Smith, Bristol) Many of these comments are straightforwardly attitudinal, and are expressed in terms of liking one accent and not liking another; and typically respondents are positive about their own varieties (though with distressing frequency this is not the case for the denizens of Birmingham). More interesting are the cases where respondents attempt to ground their comments with reference to particular phonetic or phonological characteristics of varieties, as shown in (1) by 'red badger', who encodes [h]-dropping in his/her response, and in Debbie Smith's comment on Bristol 'r'. These mentions, however, are hardly very specific, and are consequently hard to interpret. What is the issue with 'r' in Bristol here? For instance, is it the phonetic quality that counts, or its distribution? And does it matter whether someone is co...
How and why do language changes begin; how and why do they spread; and how can they ultimately be explained? This new textbook sets out to answer these questions in a clear and helpful way which will be accessible to all students with an elementary knowledge of linguistics. In the first half of the book Dr McMahon analyses changes from every area of grammar. In the second she addresses recent developments in socio-historical linguistics, and looks at such topics as language contact, linguistic variation, pidgins and creoles, and language death. Throughout the discussion is illustrated by a wealth of examples from English and other languages. Understanding Language Change will be welcomed by students as a follow-up to such introductory books as Jean Aitchison's Language Change: Progress or Decay?, also published by Cambridge University Press.
Over the past two decades, many of the major controversies in historical linguistics have centred on language classi®cation. Some of these controversies have been concentrated within linguistics, as in the methodological opposition of multilateral comparison to the traditional Comparative Method. Others have crossed discipline boundaries, with the question of whether correlations can be established between language families, archaeological cultures and genetic populations. At the same time, increasing emphasis on language contact has challenged the family tree as a model of linguistic relatedness. This paper argues that we must quantify language classi®cation, to allow objective evaluation of alternative methods within linguistics, and of proposed cross-disciplinary correlations; and that a ®rst step in this quanti®cation is represented by the`borrowing' of computational tools from biology.
Recent work on Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986, 1989, 1991, 1992a, b) raises a number of questions, specifically involving the phonetics–phonology ‘interface’. One advantage of using Articulatory Phonology (henceforth ArtP), with its basic units of abstract gestures based on articulatory movements, is its ability to link phenomena previously seen as phonological to those which are conventionally described as allophonic, or even lower-level phonetic effects, since ‘gestures are... useful primitives for characterising phonological patterns as well as for analysing the activity of the vocal tract articulators’ (Browman & Goldstein 1991: 313). If both phonetics and phonology could ultimately be cast entirely in gestural terms, the phonetics–phonology interface might effectively cease to exist, at least in terms of units of analysis.
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