Introduction: Sociophonetic perspectives on language variation 7
coronal stop deletion represents indeed one of the most studied variables in
English variationist sociolinguistics, and also one of the major focuses of the
interaction between variationism and phonological theory (mostly from the point
of view of Lexical Phonology). Nevertheless, according to the author, there are
grounds for treating (t,d) as a function of common Connected Speech Processes
observed by many phoneticians in English, rather than a particular variable rule
restricted to word-final coronal stop deletion.
The aim of the study is therefore to demonstrate that similarities exist between
the behaviour of word-final (t,d) stops and that of other word-final stop conso-
nants. The forerunner of this approach can be found in the work of phoneticians
(among whom, Francis Nolan, Paul Kerswill, and Susan Wright) who promoted
the view that, in order to uncover the conditions on the occurrence of Connected
Speech Processes, “it is necessary to adopt the techniques of sociolinguistics
in conjunction with those of experimental phonetics” (Nolan & Kerswill 1989,
p. 316). The paper by Temple integrally accepts this point of view by proposing
an in-depth phonetic acoustic analysis of a large quantity of productions taken
from the York Corpus of British English (Tagliamonte 1998), featuring a relatively
standard variety of northern British English. The analysis shows that word-final
(t,d) consonants “exhibit the same patterns of variability as other word-final stops”
and “show parallel patterns of interaction with adjacent consonants resulting from
Connected Speech Processes such as assimilation and cophonation” (p. 123).
The paper ends with a thorough discussion of different theoretical positions
on the possibility of modeling the interaction of cognitive and physical phonetic
effects to account for the observed phenomena of variation in naturalistic speech.
The author provides arguments in support of those positions that tend to dismiss
the idea of a sharp separation between cognitive and physiological constraints
in phonetic effects, and recognizes that the development of articulatory phonet-
ics and its adaptability to the dimensions and the requirements of sociophonetic
research should be encouraged as it is expected to supply more direct evidence of
the intricate interaction of cognitively and physiologically constrained effects in
speech production.
In moving from Germanic to Romance languages it is necessary to reconsider
the relationship between contemporary sociophonetics and traditional dialectol-
ogy (or linguistic geography). The latter is probably to be viewed as the cultural
root of sociolinguistic research in Europe. Yet the problematic nature of this heri-
tage is widely acknowledged, at least to the extent that, on one side, “dialectology
has been effectively isolated from general linguistics”, while on the other, “scholars
continue to search for universal principles by manipulating isolated examples –
subtracting from the available data, rather than adding to them” (Labov 1994: 442).
The Italo-Romance dialectal varieties, with their multidimensional repertory of