A sociolinguistic perspective on sociophonetic research

The four papers in this issue of the journal are jointly focused on two distinct themes: sociophonetics—the study of speakers and listeners’ sensitivity to the social context in which language is produced and perceived—and exemplar theory, as a way of explaining this behavior. In these comments, I will try to relate the findings in the first area to the field of sociolinguistics, and then relate the discussion of exemplar theory to recent studies of change in progress. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Sociophonetics and sociolinguistics The term ‘‘sociolinguistics’’ is applied to a wide range of studies that relate language and society. The quantitative analysis of linguistic change and variation began in the mid-1960s, and has steadily expanded over the past four decades. From the outset, acoustic analysis played a major role in this enterprise. The first uses of acoustic analysis in sociolinguistics were based on the early conclusions of Haskins phoneticians that the first two formants provided most of the information to discriminate English vowels (Cooper, Delattre, Liberman, Borst, & Gerstman, 1952; Delattre, Liberman, Cooper, & Gerstman, 1952; Liberman, 1957). Sound changes in progress were located in a number of speech communities (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972; Lennig, 1978). Without taking into account such demonstrated matters as spectral tilt, the dependence of F1 and F2 on F0, the influence of F3 and F4, it was possible to trace the progress of sound changes across many communities with detailed studies of the vowel systems of hundreds of speakers (Labov, 1991; Fridland, 1999; Thomas, 2001). This made it possible to carry out multivariate analyses with formant values as the dependent variables, and age, gender and social class as independent variables, controlling simultaneously for the full range of phonetic environments. As the technology of formant analysis advanced, the quantity of data that could be processed expanded to support a more general theory of sound change and the general principles that govern change across the continent of North America (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). This sociolinguistic exploitation of early phonetic technology was engaged primarily in the study of speech production; only recently can one find a parallel advance in dimensions of phonetic analysis or studies of speech perception. e front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ocn.2006.05.002 5 898 4912. ess: [email protected]. annual meeting of the Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, there were some 40 papers that utilized acoustic significant number dealing with speech perception.