Lign215 Variation in Phonetics and Phonology

Brief course description 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).