2 Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
dynamics of acquisition of socio-indexical variation (Foulkes 2010). Starting from
the observation that socio-indexical variation, alongside physically- and mechani-
cally-based phonetic variation, is not dysfunctional to, but rather favors language
acquisition (a position which is not entirely new; see e.g. Natural Phonology and
Donegan & Stampe 1979), sociophoneticians recognize that the exemplarist per-
spective is able to account for the fact that socio-indexical variation turns out to
even be a prerequisite for the development of abstract categories from superficial
exemplar stores.
The idea that the vast amount of speech variation experienced daily by chil-
dren acquiring their native language and adult speakers and hearers is a challenge
for any account of phonological processing can be seen as the principal unifying
feature of the book. Most contributions agree on the importance of developing
complex methods and procedures for inspection and quantification of large cor-
pora of speech data; some of them address the problem of how to implement a
fine-grained instrumental investigation of those subtle details of phonetic varia-
tion that are only unsystematically attested in large corpora of unplanned speech;
others specifically point to the importance of teasing out the sociophonetic dimen-
sion of variation from other dimensions of variation in speech, which are not
sociophonetic.
Sociophonetics emerges therefore as the privileged domain for the investiga-
tion of language variation and change. As a matter of fact, it is the combination of
theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis, both phonetic and
statistical, which have not reached the same level of elaboration in other domains
of language investigation that allows the researcher to disentangle step by step
the role of individual factors (sociolinguistic, physiological, communicative-
interactional etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.
At the same time, contemporary sociophonetics acknowledges its significant
debt to historical dialectology and linguistic geography. Some of the chapters con-
tained in this book offer critical insights into the legacy of traditional variationist
linguistics, linguistic geography, and dialectology for current accounts of socio-
phonetic variation. There is an apparent historical paradox, clearly emerging in
some of the papers, in the fact that those dialectal domains that were the first
targets of modern scientific dialectology (first of all, the Italo-Romance domain)
are still almost completely unexplored with respect to the social components of
the observed sound changes. This book contains some concrete efforts toward
a possible renovation of such eminent dialectological tradition through a more
systematic examination of the sociolinguistic dimensions of sound change.
The book collects a brilliant array of contributors. Some of them may be
considered among the founders of modern sociophonetics. Their field of exper-
tise spans from experimental phonetics to dialectology, from phonology to