Just back from NWAV51 in Queens, where I presented some work examining the use of classic New York City English features by native New Yorkers who’ve been living in Toronto. The larger point of the talk was that the way we assess second dialect acquisition - taking the (rate of) use of “D2” forms as a straightforward indication of acquisition - is flawed, and that it’s important to consider the positive reasons why mobile speakers might continue to use D1 forms even after they’ve acquired D2 variants.
ICPhS 2023 talk
This month I gave a talk at ICPhS 2023 in Prague, on the cot/caught distinction in the speech of native New Yorkers living in Toronto and native Torontonians living in New York City. Here’s the proceedings paper!
Praha, glimpsed through the trees of Petřín Hill
LabPhon Satellite session
In June I participated in the LabPhon Satellite Session “Challenges for Change: A Crowd-Sources Brainstorming Session” organized by Valerie Freeman and Paul De Decker. My talk (based on work with Yoojin Kang) was about sources of participant variability in remote or web-based research and ways to overcome them. Thanks to Valerie, Paul, and all the presenters and participants for a great discussion!
"English Phonetics" in the Handbook of English Linguistics
My chapter on English Phonetics now appears in the (e-book) 2nd edition of the Wiley Handbook of English Linguistics, edited by Bas Aarts, April McMahon and Lars Hinrichs. You can see a preview of the chapter in Google Books.
As I write in the introduction, “My goal in this chapter is to describe those phonetic features which are typically characteristic of English varieties, while also giving a sense of the phonetic diversity to be found within this language”, and I accordingly cite a lot of recent sociophonetics work. My hope is that this chapter is useful for students or anyone else who needs an intro to or refresher on English phonetics (perhaps because they are taking a course in Sociolinguistics or Applied Linguistics that assumes such knowledge).