Papers by Anne H . Fabricius
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2006
This paper presents results from an investigation into the social evaluation of Received Pronunci... more This paper presents results from an investigation into the social evaluation of Received Pronunciation, conducted in March 2002. The study presented samples of modern RP and regional British speech to adolescent judges in York, UK, who filled out a response questionnaire eliciting quantitative and qualitative data. The two RP speakers were both judged to have high socioeconomic status, but were otherwise differentiated markedly: the female RP speaker was judges far more favourably than the male speaker on all dimensions (status, sociability and dynamism).
This paper will focus on various facets of RP as an accent norm. In the first part of the paper I... more This paper will focus on various facets of RP as an accent norm. In the first part of the paper I will set the stage for a renewed sociolinguistic view of RP, and examine some of the e ffects of social and geographical mobility and contact on RP. At the same time, one of my concerns will be to bring a renewed class analysis into the sociolinguistic discussion. I do this, contra many sociolinguists who have recently taken up the meta-narratives of, for example, the risk society, globalisation and late modernity (see e.g. Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin 2001), in order to argue for the continuing relevance of a restructured and updated notion of individually-instantiated social class for the discussion of an elite social class accent in Britain. Along the way, and perhaps controversially, part of the agenda of this paper will be to advance the case that a renewed understanding of the concept RP itself enables RP to claim a tenable place within descriptive sociolinguistics. In the second part of this paper we will be looking at various facets of the changing situation of RP in present-day England. This includes data showing ongoing phonetic changes in progress, as well as overt and covert attitudes to RP. The phonetic data have been gleaned from sociolinguistic interviews, while the attitudinal data derive from interviews, subjective evaluation questionnaires and the popular press. By thus exploring the current and changing status of RP in the wi der sociolinguistic landscape of Britain, the discussion will also highlight several ways in which variationist and attitudinal sociolinguistic studies can mutually benefit each other.
This paper presents part of an ongoing research program which aims to apply mathematical and geom... more This paper presents part of an ongoing research program which aims to apply mathematical and geometrical analytic methods to vowel formant data to enable the quantification of parameters of variation of interest to sociophoneticians. We open with an overview of recent research working towards a set of desiderata for choice of normalization algorithm(s) based on replicable procedures. We then present the principles of centroid-based normalization and account for its performance in recent road tests. In sections 4 and 5 we introduce a method that utilizes the centroid of the speaker's vowel space as an anchor point or vertex for calculation of planar locations on formant plots, permitting quantification of the distribution of vowel tokens within the space. This information, along with details such as Euclidean distances, can then be used to precisely pinpoint the trajectories of diachronic change, for instance over a set of speakers in different age groups within a defined speech ...
Studies in World Language Problems, 2014
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... Contributors John Airey is a Senior Lecturer in English for Specific Purposes at the School o... more ... Contributors John Airey is a Senior Lecturer in English for Specific Purposes at the School of Language and Literature, Linnaeus University ... x Language and Learning in the International University Charlotte Werther is Associate Professor, CBS, has held positions at the Royal ...
Linguistics and Education, 2011
Journal of Education for Teaching, 2014
ABSTRACT This article explores linguistic and cultural border crossing and the long-term conseque... more ABSTRACT This article explores linguistic and cultural border crossing and the long-term consequences of transnational mobility on a professional international academic. It provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of a research interview which investigated the internationalisation background of a Danish academic within an English-speaking context. This individual’s personal history includes experiences abroad that have paved the way for a range of reflections and stance-takings that reflect larger scale political and ideological currents. The interviewee relates his biographical details in a way that shows a distancing from unreflected attachment to both the Danish and the USA contexts in which he has lived in the past. The interview also shows how personal circumstances and life histories can provide sources over time for ‘global reflexivity’.
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Anne Fabricius, Roskilde University, Denmark Dominic Watt, University of York, UK Sociophonetics ... more Anne Fabricius, Roskilde University, Denmark Dominic Watt, University of York, UK Sociophonetics : at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication Pisa, 14-15 December 2010 ... 1. Watt & Fabricius S-centroid normalization a vowel extrinsic, formant intrinsic ...
Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 2005
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Language Variation and Change, 2009
This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initia... more This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in . We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means within the vowel space, compared with formant data in raw Hertz. The study uses existing data sets of vowel formant data from two varieties of English, Received Pronunciation and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedure performs at least as well as the two speakerintrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods rated as best performing by Adank : Lobanov's (1971) z-score procedure and Nearey's (1978) individual log-mean procedure (CLIH i4 in Adank [2003], CLIH i2 as tested here), and in some test cases better than the latter.
The use of instrumental phonetic methods in the analysis of phonetic variation is a well-establis... more The use of instrumental phonetic methods in the analysis of phonetic variation is a well-established and integral part of quantitative sociophonetic studies, especially of vowels (Labov 1994, Thomas 2001. Recently, work has been carried out to a)
Journal of The International Phonetic Association, 2007
The present study examines evidence for change in real time within the short vowel subsystem of t... more The present study examines evidence for change in real time within the short vowel subsystem of the RP accent of English over the course of the twentieth century. It compares plots of average formant positions for the short vowels, stemming from several data corpora. It furthermore describes a change over time in the juxtaposition of the TRAP and STRUT vowels as captured in the calculated angle and distance between the two, using TRAP as a fixed point. This representation of a relationship in a single measurement by means of angle calculation is a methodological innovation for the sociophonetic enterprise. A value specifying the geometric relationship between two vowel positions is precise and replicable, as well as abstract enough to be comparable across data sets. Differences between 'phonetic' and 'sociolinguistic' stances on the interpretation of acoustic vowel data in formant plots and the issue of suitable vowel normalisation procedures for sociophonetics will also be discussed.
Language Variation and Change, 2002
Several changes in consonant and vowel pronunciations in younger generations
of native speakers ... more Several changes in consonant and vowel pronunciations in younger generations
of native speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) are currently the object of
research interest. In order to further an empirically grounded description of changes
in RP, the present study examines variation in weak vowels. Patterns of variation
in word-final open weak syllables (happy, city) as well as in past and present0
plural suffixes (waited, changes) are investigated acoustically in the interview
speech of eight young (born in the late 1970s) speakers of modern RP. The data
show variation in happy vowels for some speakers according to phonetic environment,
a phenomenon which deserves further study. kit0schwa variation in the
inflectional suffixes studied here shows a tendency to maintain kit-like values.
Overall, the study indicates that acoustic analysis of such weak vowels can provide
interesting data on variation.
We evaluate a vowel formant normalisation technique that allows direct visual and statistical com... more We evaluate a vowel formant normalisation technique that allows direct visual and statistical comparison of vowel triangles for multiple speakers of different sexes, by calculating for each speaker a 'centre of gravity' S in the F 1 ~ F 2 plane. S is calculated on the basis of formant frequency measurements taken for the so-called 'point' vowel [i], the average F 1 and F 2 for the vowel category with the highest average F 1 (for English, usually the vowel of the TRAP or START lexical sets), and hypothetical minimal F 1 and F 2 values (coordinates we label [uÈ]) extrapolated from the other two points. Expression of individual F 1 and F 2 measurements as ratios of the value of S for that formant permits direct mapping of different speakers' vowel triangles onto one another, resulting in marked improvements in agreement in vowel triangle (a) area and (b) overlap, as compared to similar mappings attempted using linear Hz scales and the z (Bark) scale. 1 We are grateful to the following people for their input, comments and other feedback: -Smith, and an anonymous reviewer. Nelson, D. (ed.) Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 9 (2002), pp. 159-173.
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Papers by Anne H . Fabricius
of native speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) are currently the object of
research interest. In order to further an empirically grounded description of changes
in RP, the present study examines variation in weak vowels. Patterns of variation
in word-final open weak syllables (happy, city) as well as in past and present0
plural suffixes (waited, changes) are investigated acoustically in the interview
speech of eight young (born in the late 1970s) speakers of modern RP. The data
show variation in happy vowels for some speakers according to phonetic environment,
a phenomenon which deserves further study. kit0schwa variation in the
inflectional suffixes studied here shows a tendency to maintain kit-like values.
Overall, the study indicates that acoustic analysis of such weak vowels can provide
interesting data on variation.
of native speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) are currently the object of
research interest. In order to further an empirically grounded description of changes
in RP, the present study examines variation in weak vowels. Patterns of variation
in word-final open weak syllables (happy, city) as well as in past and present0
plural suffixes (waited, changes) are investigated acoustically in the interview
speech of eight young (born in the late 1970s) speakers of modern RP. The data
show variation in happy vowels for some speakers according to phonetic environment,
a phenomenon which deserves further study. kit0schwa variation in the
inflectional suffixes studied here shows a tendency to maintain kit-like values.
Overall, the study indicates that acoustic analysis of such weak vowels can provide
interesting data on variation.