Quantifying geographical variation in acceptability judgments in regional American English dialect syntax

Regional variation in temporal organization in American English

Research on regional variation in the sound system of American English has focused almost exclusively on vowel quality (e.g., Labov et al. 2005; Thomas, 2001). However, several recent studies have provided preliminary evidence for regional variation in temporal organization, including speaking rate and pause distribution. The results of these studies suggest that Southerners speak more slowly (...

Refinements in Tabular Models of variation in Regional American English

Models of the geography of American regional English have been greatly influenced by the work of researchers for the proposed Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Among the representative publications one should note H. KtnlATH'S A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949) and E. B. ATWOOD'S The Regional Vocabulary of Texas (1962), particularly for their use of tables whic...

The Syntax of Verb Movement in Middle English: Dialect Variation and Language Contact

Some Acoustic Cues for Categorizing American English Regional Dialects: An Initial Report on Dialect Variation in Production and Perception1

Phonological differences between regional dialects of American English are well established in the sociolinguistics literature. The perception of these phonological differences by naïve listeners is much less well understood, however. Using an existing corpus of spoken sentences produced by talkers from a number of distinct regional dialects in the United States, an acoustic analysis was conduc...

Prosody Variation in English: Geographical, Social, Situational

The paper looks at a system of socially significant factors and the ways they affect prosody variation in British and American English. The data are based on a number of doctoral research projects carried out under the first author’s supervision in the years 1995-2003. The aim is to overview new data in search of distinguishing prosodic features which can diagnose regional and social identity. ...