LIGN215 – Variation in phonetics and phonology
Spring Quarter 2005
Instructor: Amalia
Arvaniti
This
seminar deals with the linguistic and sociolinguistic sources of variation in speech
and their formal treatment in theories of phonetics and phonology. Variation is
here broadly construed to encompass both low-level phonetic variation (often
referred to as gradience) and sociolinguistically-related variation (such as
the existence of alternant forms). Similarly, “formal treatment” should be
broadly interpreted, since some of the models we will be discussing are more
detailed than others. Finally, although production is going to be our main
focus, we will also be discussing works that deal with variation and speech
perception. Due to the vast literature of this topic (or, rather, group of
topics) we will only be covering selected aspects of variation and a limited
number of relevant phonetic and phonological models.
There
are four parts to this seminar: (i) linguistic sources of variation
(particularly prosody and its relation to pragmatics); (ii) sociolinguistic
sources of variation (a review of classic variationist research and of more
recent models of style and speaker identity); (iii) treatments of variation in
phonetic theory; (iv) treatments of variation in phonological theory
(particularly OT and usage-based models).
The
seminar will be based on readings of primary literature and review papers, with
a few lectures interspersed in between providing background information on the
topics covered. Each student is expected to lead the discussion of course
readings at least twice during the
quarter (the exact number will depend on the number of students in the class).