"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).

Short report in Annual Review of Applied Linguistics

My short report, Media and Second Dialect Acquisition, is now published online at Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Sociolinguistic research suggests that traditional broadcast media (i.e. TV) doesn’t seem to affect people’s accents much, at least not in a way that’s easy to empirically document; at the same time, phonetics research has shown that participants will measurably shift their accents towards ambient recorded voices. What gives? In this paper, I explore this disconnect and suggest some possibilities for future research exploring new/social media and its effect on accent.

ICLaVE 10 talk in Leeuwarden

special delivery in Leeuwarden

Title slide (thanks to Sandra Jansen for the photo!)

Just back from an excellent trip to the Netherlands! After jaunts in Amsterdam, Leiden, and the eastern countryside, we headed up to Leeuwarden for ICLaVE 10 where I gave my talk, A difference without a distinction? How speakers split word classes without acquiring new categories. My talk was part of a larger panel on phonemic splits organized by Sandra Jansen and Natalie Braber - thanks to both for inviting me to be a part of it!

New article in Language Variation & Change; NWAV talk

My article Stylistic variation among mobile speakers: Using old and new regional variables to construct complex place identity has just been published in Language Variation and Change! In this paper I examine whether Canadians living in U.S. cities (NYC and DC) adjust their use of regionally varying vowels depending on how they talk about place (short answer: yes, but only if vowel/place links are socially salient).

I’ve also just returned from a great trip to NYC for NWAV 47, held at NYU, where I presented a talk titled What Do We Mean by Structure?: Mobile Speakers and the (Non-)Coherence of Chain Shifts and had a lot of fun catching up with friends and colleagues from my PhD alma mater!