Introduction
Sociophonetic perspectives on language variation
Chiara Celata* and Silvia Calamai**
* Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
** Università degli Studi di Siena- Why this volume?
This volume collects seven papers in contemporary sociophonetic research. It
addresses hot themes in sociophonetics and proposes a fresh look at old prob-
lems still open to debate. A variety of approaches is proposed without neglecting
the need for a coherent discussion of the nature of variation in speech and how
speakers develop a cognitive representation of it. These characteristics distinguish
the present volume from the panorama of comparable sociophonetic literature,
which mainly consists of textbooks, readers, and journal special issues (as well as
individual journal articles, conference proceedings, and informal reports).
According to Jannedy & Hay (2006), contemporary sociophonetics and
sociophonology differ from early variationist sociolinguistics for their focus on
the cognitive representation of phonetic variation in the mind of the individual.
Stated differently, the fundamental purpose of sociophonetic studies should be
that of analyzing how the concrete communicative experiences are categorized
by the speakers and, most importantly, of establishing the function of such com-
plex nucleus of information in the structuring of linguistic systems. The fusion of
sociolinguistics and phonetics occurs therefore within a cognitivist perspective in
which the probabilistic nature of the language and the interest for the processes
of language use and comprehension play a special role. The diffused reference to
usage-based models of language perception, production and representation and
to Exemplar Theory (Goldinger 1998; Bybee 2000; Pierrehumbert 2001) possibly
is the most salient cue of the discontinuity from early accounts of sociolinguistic
variation (see, for a similar reasoning, the paper by Laks et al. in this volume).
Exemplar Theory is considered a resource for understanding and modelling the