Anne Fabricius

A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics

This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means within the vowel space, compared with formant data in raw Hertz. The study uses existing data sets of vowel formant data from two varieties of English, Received Pronunciation and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedure performs at least as well as the two speaker-intrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods rated as best performing by Adank (2003): Lobanovs (1971) z-score procedure and Neareys (1978) individual log-mean procedure (CLIHi4 in Adank [2003], CLIHi2 as tested here), and in some test cases better than the latter.

Variation and change in the trap and strut vowels of RP: a real time comparison of five acoustic data sets

The present study examines evidence for change in real time within the short vowel subsystem of the RP accent of English over the course of the twentieth century. It compares plots of average formant positions for the short vowels, stemming from several data corpora. It furthermore describes a change over time in the juxtaposition of the trap and strut vowels as captured in the calculated angle and distance between the two, using trap as a fixed point. This representation of a relationship in a single measurement by means of angle calculation is a methodological innovation for the sociophonetic enterprise. A value specifying the geometric relationship between two vowel positions is precise and replicable, as well as abstract enough to be comparable across data sets. Differences between ‘phonetic’ and ‘sociolinguistic’ stances on the interpretation of acoustic vowel data in formant plots and the issue of suitable vowel normalisation procedures for sociophonetics will also be discussed.

Weak vowels in modern RP: An acoustic study of happy-tensing and KIT/schwa shift

Several changes in consonant and vowel pronunciations in younger generations of native speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) are currently the object of research interest. In order to further an empirically grounded description of changes in RP, the present study examines variation in weak vowels. Patterns of variation in word-final open weak syllables (happ y , cit y ) as well as in past and present/plural suffixes (wait ed , chang es ) are investigated acoustically in the interview speech of eight young (born in the late 1970s) speakers of modern RP. The data show variation in happ y vowels for some speakers according to phonetic environment, a phenomenon which deserves further study. kit /schwa variation in the inflectional suffixes studied here shows a tendency to maintain kit -like values. Overall, the study indicates that acoustic analysis of such weak vowels can provide interesting data on variation.

Language Ideologies in Danish Higher Education: Exploring student perspectives

This chapter presents a qualitative analysis of attitudes towards different forms of English held by four students at an international study programme in Denmark. The students belong to a transient multilingual community in which historically-accrued language ideologies cannot necessarily be assumed to be shared by all members. Our analysis suggests that the students see competence and effectiveness as important parameters in their evaluation of different forms of English in the university context, irrespective of the provenance of the speaker, but they also subscribe to familiar language ideologies that favour ‘native’ English varieties and accents over other kinds of English. This could be seen as a contradiction between practice and ideology, but we argue that the contradiction is only apparent.

Investigating speech samples as dialect in discourse : Discourse analysis, phonetics and language attitudes

Abstract This paper seeks to explore the use of spontaneous speech samples in indirect language attitude investigations. It examines two such texts used in an attitudi-nal survey carried out in York in March 2002. In this survey, teenagers at three secondary schools in York were asked to respond to samples of dialect-in-discourse from various kinds of British English. The speech samples examined here are from two male speakers educated at fee-paying schools in England, one of modern RP and one of Regional British English. Discourse and phonetic features are analyzed and compared. The quantitative and qualitative results of the attitude survey are then presented and aligned with the characteristics of the samples. The paper ultimately argues for a ‘gestalt’ approach to spontaneous speech samples used for evaluation: seeing the samples as performances with their uniquely detailed opportunities for interpretation, which can, with care, be generalized to community attitudes.

Using angle calculations to demonstrate vowel shifts: A diachronic investigation of the short vowel system in 20th-century RP (UK)

Abstract This paper gives an overview of the long-term trends of diachronic changes evident within the short vowel system of RP during the 20th century. More specifically, it focuses on changing juxtapositions of the TRAP, STRUT and LOT, FOOT vowel centroid positions. The paper uses geometric calculations to give precise and replicable representations of the vowel system and the generational changes apparent in the data. While FOOT-fronting is well known in British English (Torgersen 1997), less is known about the historical trajectory of the STRUT vowel in response to the encroachment of the TRAP vowel whose lowering and backing are also well-documented (Wells 1982). The discussion draws out differences between ‘phonetic’ and ‘sociolinguistic’ stances on the interpretation of acoustic vowel data in formant plots.

The transnational and the individual: a life-history narrative in a Danish university context

This article explores linguistic and cultural border crossing and the long-term consequences of transnational mobility on a professional international academic. It provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of a research interview which investigated the internationalisation background of a Danish academic within an English-speaking context. This individual’s personal history includes experiences abroad that have paved the way for a range of reflections and stance-takings that reflect larger scale political and ideological currents. The interviewee relates his biographical details in a way that shows a distancing from unreflected attachment to both the Danish and the USA contexts in which he has lived in the past. The interview also shows how personal circumstances and life histories can provide sources over time for ‘global reflexivity’.

A new speaker‐intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm for sociophonetics

This paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a speaker‐intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt and Fabricius (2002) and modeled by Thomas and Kendall (2007) for direct comparison with other normalization algorithms. We evaluate the merits of the new routine as a sociophonetic research tool relative to those of two well‐known speaker‐intrinsic methods documented in Lobanov (1971) and Nearey (1977) through comparisons of the values of two parameters: degree of overlap of vowel spaces and vowel space area ratios. Measurements of angles and Euclidean distances between pairs of points in the vowel space (a method presented in Fabricius 2007) also provide a comparative parameter revealing how different algorithms model the vowel space. The study uses two existing datasets: 1) a corpus of RP vowels compiled from Hawkins and Midgley (2005) and Moreiras (2006) and 2) previously unpublished data from Aberdeen, northeast Scotland.

Social Change, Linguistic Change and Sociolinguistic Change in Received Pronunciation

This chapter summarises recent quantitative research on phonetic variation and change in Received Pronunciation (RP) as an elite sociolect, the vernacular of a multiplex socio-economically privileged group in the UK. The ‘elite sociolect’ is distinct from the ‘standard variety’, a term which should be reserved to refer to a socially generated mental ‘construct’, a set of expressed and tacit norms for ‘status-bearing’ language practice learned through the educational system and evident in the public domain. The chapter discusses variationist findings on word-final /t/, prevocalic /r/ and a range of vowel qualities. It also addresses evidence of sociolinguistic change, in the form of ongoing de-standardisation processes in the speech community of England, as well as the changing language-ideological and language-attitudinal place of RP in the sociolinguistic landscape.

The Handbook of English Linguistics

Collected Poems in 1979. Now Vivien Noakes has come out with a definitive, more scholarly, variorum edition of Rosenberg’s works which gives the most authentic versions of his poems, their dates and their publication history. Now that we have all Rosenberg’s poems in their authentic versions and in their chronological order, we can make a just estimate of him as a poet. He had little formal education but he was well-read in English poetry and was also familiar with foreign poets like Poe and Verlaine. He was drawn to the spiritual world of mysteries and uncertainties and adopted the symbolist mode as a poet. Though his early poems showed his original technical skill and firm linguistic control, they tended to be rather abstract, and often opaque. But the poems that he wrote after he joined the army achieved a certain solidity because they grew out of his immediate experiences. He did retain his interest in the spiritual but now he grounded his spirituality in the real. His ‘‘Daughters of War’’, which he regarded as his best poem, and in which he had ‘‘striven to get that sense of inexorableness the human (or unhuman) side of this war’’, is an excellent example of this. In fact, his aesthetic approach to war made him distinctively different from the other war poets of his time. While they mostly wrote about the physical horrors and pity of war, Rosenberg saw war’s sufferings in terms of the tragedy of human existence. He did write poems of physical horrors like the ‘‘Dead Man’s Dump’’ in which he spoke of ‘‘The wheels lurched over sprawled dead/ But pained them not,’’ but more often his best efforts turned out to be poems about life and death against a burning landscape. Now, thanks to Noakes’s excellent edition of Rosenberg’s poems, we can give him his full recognition as a distinctive poet of the war.