The Corpus Phonology of English

Abstract

Uses corpus data to investigate variation and change in contemporary varieties of spoken English Examines spoken varieties of English in Manchester, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand and the USA Examines English in comparison to French, Polish and Japanese Draws on data from the PAC Lancashire, Boston, Manchester, Michigan and Dunedin corpora, the IDEA corpus and the Greater Poland Speech Corpus Brings together an international range of contributors in various fields of phonological research from the UK, France, Poland, Norway and JapanIncludes over 100 tables and figures to clearly demonstrate key concepts, data and ideas Placing contemporary spoken English at the centre of phonological research, this book tackles the issue of language variation and change through a range of methodological and theoretical approaches. In doing so the book bridges traditionally separate fields such as experimental phonetics, theoretical phonology, language acquisition and sociolinguistics. Made up of 12 chapters, it explores a substantial range of linguistic phenomena. It covers auditory, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, second language pronunciation and perception, sociophonetics, cross-linguistic comparison of vowel reduction and methodological issues in the construction of phonological corpora. The book presents new data and analyses which demonstrate what phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists do with their corpora and show how various theoretical and experimental questions can be explored in light of authentic spoken data.