Class matters: the sociolinguistics ofgooseandgoatin Manchester English

Pre-aspiration and glottalisation in Manchester English

The study focuses on the relationship between preaspiration and glottalisation in Manchester English. Analyses of five speakers aged 20-22 years indicate there is a prosodically conditioned complementary distribution: pre-aspiration is found word-medially (batter [patəә]), while glottalisation occurs wordfinally (bat [pat]) in plosive contexts. In fricative contexts (e.g. mass), analysed for th...

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of ”computational sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL r...

Style Matters Teaching English for specific purposes

Few would dispute the need for students of scientific disciplines to learn English. The teaching of English to scientists whose first language is not English is essentially utilitarian. The learners need English as a means of doing their work efficiently and of furthering their specialist education, and the language is not taught with a general educational aim in mind, as a cultural or social e...

The Proximate Phonological Unit of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Proficiency Matters

An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables a...

Social Class, Social Status and Stratification: Revisiting Familiar Concepts in Sociolinguistics