Introduction: Sociophonetic perspectives on language variation 11
since much variation is attested across speakers and also within the speech of indi-
vidual speakers. Third, the auditory output is ambiguous with respect to the glottal
and articulatory mechanisms, in such a way that the observed variability is incon-
sistent with some proposed theories of the propagation of sound changes from
listeners’ misinterpretations (e.g., Ohala 1974). The author appropriately argues
that only a combination of different instrumental techniques, such as transillu-
mination and airflow measurements, would produce a substantial advancement
in the investigation of the articulatory mechanisms of ejectives’ production – a
position that reinforces similar arguments expressed in several other papers in
the book. Fourth, the attested articulatory and functional ambiguity of ejectives
is necessarily related to the very low number of occurrences in a given corpus.
More specifically, the paper reports that in three hours of the television comedy
The Office, only eight instances of ejectives were identified. This poses obvious
problems from a methodological point of view: how would it be possible to apply
a corpus perspective in the study of such infrequent speech phenomena? How
should we track the precise development in time and space of marginal phonetic
features by avoiding at the same time over-interpretations (besides misinterpreta-
tions) of the data? The author also points out that the level of phonetic-articulatory
detail generally annotated in the available corpora is insufficient to the analysis of
the spread of ejectives throughout the English language.
Some of these concerns, and particularly the latter, are probably also valid
for several other phenomena worthy of sociophonetic investigation. This clearly
encourages sociophonetics to pursue the journey through territories that in all
probability still contain more surprises than might be expected.
- Acknowledgments
The idea for this book originated during the international workshop
“Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and commu-
nication”, which was held at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in December
- The workshop attracted young linguists and consolidated experts from
many corners of the globe, even unsuspected ones including South Africa and
Japan, and appeared to inspire a lively debate on key concepts and new empirical
evidence in the sociophonetic domain. A volume of proceedings with a selection
of the papers that were presented at the conference came out in January 2012
(Calamai et al. 2012).
This book stemmed from the resolution of making the most pertinent con-
cepts and hypotheses presented at the workshop available to a larger audience.
We therefore asked several of our invited speakers to supply material that would