University of Leeds - Department of Linguistics and Phonetics

Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics

ISSN 1747-9339

No. 11, 2006

Edited by Barry Heselwood and Cécile De Cat

CONTENTS

Editorial preface

AKINMADE TIMOTHY AKANDE
Investigating dialectal variation in the English of Nigerian university graduates: Methodology and pilot study
abstract - full text

BETHAN L. DAVIES
Testing dialogue principles in task-oriented dialogues: An exploration of cooperation, collaboration, effort and risk
abstract - full text

MANEL HERAT
Substitute one in Sri Lankan English
abstract - full text

BARRY HESELWOOD
Final schwa and r-sandhi in RP English
abstract - full text

SALLY JOHNSON & ASTRID ENSSLIN
Language in the news: Some reflections on keyword analysis using Wordsmith Tools and the BNC
abstract - full text

MIHO KAMATA
A socio-phonetic study of the dress, trap and strut vowels in London English
abstract - full text

SHARON MARSDEN
A sociophonetic study of labiodental /r/ in Leeds
abstract - full text

LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
The role of perceptual and discourse cues in the choice of referential expressions in English pre-schoolers and school-age children
abstract - full text

Editorial Preface

Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics is a series produced by the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of Leeds. Its aim is to publicise ongoing research by staff and students of the Department. We are also pleased to include contributions from colleagues in other departments at the University of Leeds, from other institutions and from visiting scholars who have made presentations in our research seminar series. All submissions have been subject to peer review.

Because of rising production costs, we have decided to no longer produce the working papers in hard copy. We hope that the electronic on-line version will continue to reach a wide readership.

The contributions in volume 11, covering the academic years 2005-06, are ordered alphabetically. The areas covered include aspects of two varieties of World Englishes (Akande, Herat), language in the media (Johnson & Ensslin), children’s discourse (Serratrice), experimental pragmatics (Davies), sociophonetics (Kamata, Marsden) and the phonology of [r]-sandhi (Heselwood). Many thanks to all the contributors and reviewers.

Barry Heselwood and Cécile De Cat (Editors)

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Investigating dialectal variation in the English of Nigerian university graduates: Methodology and pilot study
AKINMADE TIMOTHY AKANDE

This paper describes the methodological procedures that will be used in the collection of data for a dialectal study of the English of Nigerian university graduates. It also reports on a pilot study carried out on this topic. The major elicitation instrument will be a Labovian sociolinguistic interview which will be supplemented by reading materials (Labov 1966). The study will also draw heavily on the current SuRE methodology by Upton and Llamas (1999). The theoretical framework that will be used in the analysis of data will be a diglossia model as this approach enables one to view Nigerian English (NE) as a continuum on which different varieties of English such as Standard English, non-Standard English and Nigerian Pidgin English exist.

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Testing dialogue principles in task-oriented dialogues: An exploration of cooperation, collaboration, effort and risk
BETHAN L. DAVIES

This paper takes four behavioural principles which have been suggested as explanatory models for human conversation and tests them on a corpus of task-oriented dialogues (the HCRC Map Task Corpus). The principles chosen are Grice’s Cooperative Principle, a folklinguistic notion of ‘cooperation’ (which we argue is often confused with the Gricean notion), Clark’s Collaborative Theory, and Shadbolt’s Principle of Parsimony. The aim of the study is to compare the explanatory power of each of these principles when they are applied to real language data.

Each of the principles was converted into a set of representative hypotheses about the types of behaviour which they would predict in dialogue. Then, a way of coding dialogue behaviour was developed, in order that the hypotheses could be tested on a suitably sized dataset. In particular, the coding system tried to distinguish between the levels of effort which participants used in their utterances. Finally, a series of statistical tests was undertaken to test the predictions of the hypotheses on the information generated by the coding system.

The strongest support was found for the Principle of Parsimony and its associate Principle of Least Individual Effort, at the expense of the Collaborative Principle and the Principle of Least Collaborative Effort. There is certainly evidence that speakers try to minimise effort, but this seems to be occurring on an individual basis – which can be to the cost of the overall dialogue and task performance – rather than on a collaborative basis. Some support was also found for Gricean Cooperation, although this is weakened by the difficulty in transforming the underspecified nature of Grice’s work into a precise and unarguable set of predictions. However, a clear distinction can be drawn between Gricean Cooperation and the folklinguistic notion: even a broad definition of Grice is manifestly different from the predictions made for ‘cooperation’, and these indicators of ‘cooperation’ were not supported by the data.

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Substitute one in Sri Lankan English
MANEL HERAT

The way in which habitual speakers of Sri Lankan English use substitute one is compared to the ways in which it is used in Standard British and American English as desrcibed by Biber et al. (1999). The differences result from speakers of Sri Lankan English (SLE) having broadened the rules of Standard English to accommodate their needs. The rules are in essence the same, but whereas in Standard English one always implies an antecedent, this is not always the case in SLE, where the antecedent is generally missing and has to be interpreted using one’s own knowledge.

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Final schwa and r-sandhi in RP English
BARRY HESELWOOD

An analysis of final schwa as a vocalised allophone of /r/ in RP English is presented. Phonetic similarity of [] and [¨], their distribution, and the phenomenon of R-sandhi are used as evidence to support the analysis. The continuous presence since fully rhotic times of stem-final /r/ in the context of a following vowel-initial suffix or word, and the merger of commA words with lettER words beginning around the time of loss of rhoticity in the eighteenth century, are key factors in the analysis.

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Language in the news: Some reflections on keyword analysis using Wordsmith Tools and the BNC
SALLY JOHNSON & ASTRID ENSSLIN

It is not uncommon to hear linguists lamenting the mis-representation of language whenever linguistic issues are taken up by the media. Ironically, however, we have relatively little systematic understanding of the ways in which language is actually dealt with in, and by, those media. This paper focuses on methodological issues that arose in the context of a project that aimed to explore the ways in which themes relating to language and linguistics are represented in a corpus of articles gathered from two British newspapers, The Times and The Guardian. Using the software programme WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2004) to identify those ‘key’ keywords that were most likely to occur in conjunction with the ‘node terms’ <language>, <languages>, <linguistic> and <linguistics>, this corpus-based methodology revealed a number of interesting ways in which language-related issues are debated in this particular sector of the print media. At the same time, as will be discussed in this paper, our study raised some important methodological concerns in relation to the use of WordSmith Tools, the British National Corpus, and the construction of keyword lists.

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A socio-phonetic study of the dress, trap and strut vowels in London English
MIHO KAMATA

This study presents a preliminary empirical socio-phonetic investigation of the realisations of the three short vowels DRESS, TRAP and STRUT (Wells 1982a), produced by eight male Londoners, attempting to discover a possible vowel shift involving these vowels in London speech . Two social characteristics of the subjects, age (young vs. old) and social class (working class (WC) vs. upper middle class (UMC)), are considered in three different speech styles; Interview Style, Reading Passage Style and Word List Style. Making use of a vowel formant normalisation technique called S-procedure (Watt & Fabricius 2002), a direct comparison of vowel realisations for several individuals are shown on the same plot. As a result, different directional vowel shifts are found between WC and UMC. This paper will also briefly consider, firstly, a conceptual issue regarding accent varieties in London, secondly, a sociolinguistic issue for social class classification based on occupations, and finally a methodological issue in terms of vowel normalisation.

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A sociophonetic study of labiodental /r/ in Leeds
SHARON MARSDEN

Labiodental /r/ has previously been considered a mark of infantile, defective or affected speech. However, recent literature has highlighted its increasing credibility as an accepted feature of regional dialects. This paper tracks the spread of the variant, investigating its use in the city of Leeds. Auditory analysis of apparent time data is employed to assess the frequency of labiodental /r/ articulations among Leeds speakers. Since there is an absence in the literature of social identity perspectives on the diffusion of labiodental /r/, this paper also explores speakers’ social networks in relation to their use of the labiodental variant. The findings contribute to sociolinguistic theories of language variation and change, emphasising the link between the social dynamics of speakers and the spread of novel linguistic features.

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The role of perceptual and discourse cues in the choice of referential expressions in English pre-schoolers and school-age children
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE

In the current studies we investigated English-speaking pre-school and young school-age children’s choice of referential expressions in a referential communication game. In study 1 we crossed two variables: the type of question asked (general vs. specific) and the availability of the listener (present vs. absent). In study 2 we manipulated the number of referents (one vs. two) and the availability of the listener (present vs. absent). The results showed that all children were very sensitive to the type of question asked, the number of referents was also a reliable predictor of type of referential expression, while the presence of the listener was the variable that posed the largest number of difficulties, even to the oldest six-year-olds. These findings are interpreted against the relative contribution of lexical- and construction-specific knowledge and of perspective-taking abilities in the presence of converging and diverging discourse and perceptual cues.

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