Wake up and smell the irony.
I returned from the LSA conference this last week. I generally like conferences. I liked this one, too. I saw some good talks, did some good networking, got some good deals on books, had some good food, etc. I also saw a couple rather bizarre talks.
For example, there was a workshop on sociophonetics. What’s interesting, is that there was only one sociophonetician on the panel, the rest were a bunch of LabPhon people and, for some reason, an Optimality Theorist. Some of the points were as follows:
· Phonetic convergence is primarily a social phenomena, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being automatic. I agree with this conclusion, and incidentally, it was also the only talk given by a bona fide sociophonetician.
· Listeners have different “phonetic expectations” for talkers of different presumed ethnic groups. This is kind of where the sociolinguists in the audience (like myself) and the more traditional phoneticians in the audience split. Penny Eckert mentioned to the speaker that often there are other implicit presumptions listeners carry with them that correlate with ethnicity that can explain the experimental results as well. This is why sociophonetics needs *needs* the “socio” part.
· Listeners utilize different phonetic spaces when addressing different genders. In this experiment, they tested how men and women talk to males and females, which is a very simplistic view of gender, but hey, who’s counting?
· Edward Flemming (the OT guy) got up and talked about linguistic constraints on sociolinguistic behavior. That’s bassackwards. Multivariate analyses consistently show that linguistic variables are never independent variables.
I started classes this semester. I feel slightly ripped off that I didn’t get much of a break at all, but it’s nice to have something different to do, I guess. I’m signed up for Ugaritic, Acoustics of Speech and Hearing, and Research Seminar in Sociolinguistics. I’ll let you know how they go.