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1.1. Sociophonetic perspectives
This volume collects seven papers in contemporary sociophonetic research. It addresses hot themes in sociophonetics and proposes a fresh look at old problems still open to debate. A variety of approaches is proposed without neglecting the need for a coherent discussion of the nature of variation in speech and how speakers develop a cognitive representation of it. These characteristics distinguish the present volume from the panorama of comparable sociophonetic literature, which mainly consists of textbooks, readers, and journal special issues (as well as individual journal articles, conference proceedings, and informal reports).
According to Jannedy & Hay (2006), contemporary sociophonetics and sociophonology differ from early variationist sociolinguistics for their focus on the cognitive representation of phonetic variation in the mind of the individual. Stated differently, the fundamental purpose of sociophonetic studies should be that of analyzing how the concrete communicative experiences are categorized by the speakers and, most importantly, of establishing the function of such complex nucleus of information in the structuring of linguistic systems. The fusion of sociolinguistics and phonetics occurs therefore within a cognitivist perspective in which the probabilistic nature of the language and the interest for the processes of language use and comprehension play a special role. The diffused reference to usage-based models of language perception, production and representation and to Exemplar Theory (Goldinger 1998, Bybee 2000, Pierrehumbert 2001) possibly is the most salient cue of the discontinuity from early accounts of sociolinguistic variation (see, for a similar reasoning, the paper by Laks et al. in this volume). Exemplar Theory is considered a resource for understanding and modelling the dynamics of acquisition of socioindexical variation (Foulkes 2010). Starting from the observation that socio-indexical variation, alongside physically- and mechanically-based phonetic variation, is not dysfunctional to, but rather favors language acquisition (a position which is not entirely new; see e.g. Natural Phonology and Donegan & Stampe 1979), sociophoneticians recognize that the exemplarist perspective is able to account for the fact that socio-indexical variation turns out to even be a prerequisite for the development of abstract categories from superficial exemplar stores.
The idea that the vast amount of speech variation experienced daily by children acquiring their native language and adult speakers and hearers is a challenge for any account of phonological processing can be seen as the principal unifying feature of the book. Most contributions agree on the importance of developing complex methods and procedures for inspection and quantification of large corpora of speech data; some of them address the problem of how to implement a fine-grained instrumental investigation of those subtle details of phonetic variation that are only unsystematically attested in large corpora of unplanned speech; others specifically point to the importance of teasing out the sociophonetic dimension of variation from other dimensions of variation in speech, which are not sociophonetic.
Sociophonetics emerges therefore as the privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. As a matter of fact, it is the combination of theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis, both phonetic and statistical, which have not reached the same level of elaboration in other domains of language investigation that allows the researcher to disentangle step by step the role of individual factors (sociolinguistic, physiological, communicative-interactional etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.
At the same time, contemporary sociophonetics acknowledges its significant debt to historical dialectology and linguistic geography. Some of the chapters contained in this book offer critical insights into the legacy of traditional variationist linguistics, linguistic dialectology, and dialectology for current accounts of sociophonetic variation. There is an apparent historical paradox, clearly emerging in some of the papers, in the fact that those dialectal domains that were the first targets of modern scientific dialectology (first of all, the Italo-Romance domain) are still almost completely unexplored with respect to the social components of the observed sound changes. This book contains some concrete efforts toward a possible renovation of such eminent dialectological tradition through a more systematic examination of the sociolinguistic dimensions of sound change.
The book collects a brilliant array of contributors. Some of them may be considered among the founders of modern sociophonetics. Their field of expertise spans from experimental phonetics to dialectology, from phonology to sociolinguistics. The case studies proposed (covering both Germanic – English and German – and Romance languages – French and varieties of the ItaloRomance domain) will appeal to the international audience. The originality of many of the issues treated and the methodologically sound approaches by which some theoretical nodes of the discipline are addressed make this volume a valuable resource for scholars interested in speech variation, social uses of language, and phonological representations.
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