6 Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
The link between the auditory, acoustic, and articulatory levels of analysis is
a crucial point developed in the paper, inasmuch as the authors recognize that
“each [level] gives a rather different (and incomplete) picture of the ‘same’ thing”
(p. 68). The paper therefore combines the three different perspectives, including
Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI), in order to uncover the mechanisms of der-
hoticisation in production as well as perception. The question of whether and to
what extent articulatory phonetics may (and has to) be integrated in traditional
acoustics-based sociophonetic research is indeed a very controversial and topical
issue (Celata & Calamai 2012). The paper by Stuart-Smith et al. offers a demon-
stration that it is possible to obtain natural, casual speech in an UTI experimental
setting: according to the collected data, speech style appears to be more depen-
dent on the speakers’ relationships with their interlocutors and the presence of
friends and peers than with the experimental context in which data themselves
are collected.
Particular attention is also devoted to the influence of broadcast media on lan-
guage change. The results of a large-scale research project addressing the question
of how London-based TV dramas exert their influence on Glaswegian vernacular
phonology are summarized. The authors claim that the influence of the media
language functions to emphasize the existent speech diversifications and accelerate
sound changes in progress, which is more similar to internal developments than
to the dynamics of language contact.
The listener is considered from two different points of view in the paper: as
a phonetic analyst and as an “actor” parsing and responding to the different vari-
ants along the rhotic-derhotic continuum. In the first case, the problems of com-
mon practices of phonetic transcription is addressed. An experiment in which
three expert phoneticians were requested to label different derhoticized vari-
ants illustrates that the transcribers mostly agreed on the number and the qual-
ity of the variants, while showing at the same time the existence of irreducible
divergences concerning the position of the category boundaries. Concerning the
second point, the reviewed studies show that derhoticisation also has a clear per-
ceptual counterpart in the Glaswegian community. This is consistent with the view
that both perception/imitation and production should be included in systematic
socio- articulatory studies to develop a clearer picture of how articulatory varia-
tion spreads from speaker to hearer (e.g., Evans 2010) – a point that the authors
emphasize repeatedly throughout the paper.
Rosalind Temple’s paper “Where and what is (t,d)? A case study in taking a
step back in order to advance sociophonetics” departs from the following obser-
vation: in the sociophonetic literature, insufficient attention has been paid to the
actual phonetic substance of some major variables, such as word-final coronal
stop deletion in English, usually treated as a categorical variable rule. Word-final