10 Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
consider whether the outcome will be so decisive that the game is worth the can-
dle”; Labov 1994: 75). In this respect, oral archives, digital preservation and audio
restoration offer a substantial contribution to the study of language changes. The
lack of phonetic records for instrumental measurements in the real time axis may
be counterbalanced by a deeper exploration of this kind of Intangible Cultural
Heritage, which is the result of a composite work of ‘voice’ preservation performed
by dialectologists as well as anthropologists and ethnographers along the twentieth
century (Ginouvès 2011). The exploration of sound archives may provide impor-
tant insights for the development of a true historical experimental sociophonetics,
as the Sornicola & Calamai’s paper attempts at demonstrating.- Problematic sociophonetics
With Adrian Simpson’s paper “Ejectives in English and German – Linguistic,
sociophonetic, interactional, epiphenomenal?” the reader is engaged in a close
inquiry on the apparent spread of ejectives in varieties of British English. The pro-
duction of ejectives in English (as compared to German) is a case of articulatory
variation that does not properly fit with the traditional classification of sociopho-
netic change.
Phonetic variation of English and German ejectives is analysed with respect
to two different dimensions: function and production. The fine phonetic detail in
ejectives articulation is discussed; the paper does not directly rely on a large and
sociolinguistically stratified mass of speech data, as other papers of the volume do,
though several hours of a television comedy are the reference data set of the analy-
sis and attention is devoted to conversational situations. Moreover, it is argued that
the analysis of the contexts in which the sound change unfolds must also proceed
cautiously, as the structural context (e.g., word-finality) and the conversational
context (e.g., spontaneous conversation with floor-holding pause) interact in natu-
ral language production in such a way that “within normal interaction, there are
different categories of word-finality or pre-pausality, different contexts which may
or may not be accompanied by different bundles of phonetic events” (p. 190).
Simpson’s paper can therefore be seen as a purposely provocative conclusion
to this volume, inasmuch as it clearly points out issues in the study of ongoing
sound changes that are problematic for current sociophonetic research.
In particular, the sound change involving the apparent spread of ejectives in
varieties of British English appears to be somewhat atypical for a number of rea-
sons. First, it seems to have an internal and independent origin in several neigh-
boring varieties, rather than a contact-induced source. Second, it is characterized
by a rather low degree of predictability of occurrence in the different contexts,