The sound patterns of Englishes: representing phonetic similarity
The sound patterns of Englishes: representing phonetic similarity
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英语的发音模式：代表语音相似性
DOI：
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发表时间：
2007
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Warren Maguire
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
A. McMahon;P. Heggarty;R. McMahon;Warren Maguire
语言学家能够正式而精确地描述、记录和分类口音之间的异同，但直到最近还没有可靠和客观的方法来衡量差异的程度。说不同的品种如何相似是一回事，评价它们有多相似则完全是另一回事。另一方面，最近在历史语言学中有一个强烈的焦点，即用于比较和分类语言的定量方法的发展；但这些都倾向于应用于语言家族成员的问题，在家族树的相当高的层次上，而不是在个人口音的层次上。在这篇文章中，我们概述了我们尝试用定量的方法来解决口音的相对相似性问题。我们举例说明了我们在一些（主要是英国）英语变体的同源词样本中测量语音相似性的方法，并展示了如何使用更新和更具创新性的网络图而不是树来显示这些结果。我们考虑了这些方法在跟踪英语和其他领域的持续变化方面的一些应用，并讨论了未来的前景。
Linguists are able to describe, transcribe, and classify the differences and similarities between accents formally and precisely, but there has until very recently been no reliable and objective way of measuring degrees of difference. It is one thing to say how varieties are similar, but quite another to assess how similar they are. On the other hand, there has recently been a strong focus in historical linguistics on the development of quantitative methods for comparing and classifying languages; but these have tended to be applied to problems of language family membership, at rather high levels in the family tree, not down at the level of individual accents. In this article, we outline our attempts to address the question of relative similarity of accents using quantitative methods. We illustrate our method for measuring phonetic similarity in a sample of cognate words for a number of (mainly British) varieties of English, and show how these results can be displayed using newer and more innovative network diagrams, rather than trees. We consider some applications of these methods in tracking ongoing changes in English and beyond, and discuss future prospects.