Seminar: Sociophonetics

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The field of sociophonetics is concerned with ‘identifying, and ultimately explaining, the sources, loci, patterns, and communicative functions of socially structured variation in speech’ (Foulkes et al. 2010: 704). Sociophonetic research shows how nuances of pronunciation are used by speakers to convey social information and by listeners to draw conclusions about the social identity of their interlocutors. Researchers in this field also bring the empirical facts of variation to bear on questions of phonetic and phonological theory, using speech production and perception data to inform accounts of how sounds and words are learned, represented, processed, and linked to social information. The goal of this course is to address key issues in phonetics and phonology by critically reviewing relevant sociophonetic literature, identifying conflicts as well as common threads across this research, sketching the overall picture of the phonological and phonetic system that is implied by this work, and presenting avenues for future research that can fill in the gaps. Topics that will be discussed include contrast & the phonemic inventory, phonotactics and alternations, the perception/production relationship, representations vs processes as the locus of variation, L1 acquisition, and language change.