Telephone Survey of Sound Change in Progress

声音变化正在进行中的电话调查

• 批准号: 9222458
• 负责人: William Labov
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1993
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1993-03-01 至 1995-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9222458&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Telephone; Survey; Sound; Change; Progress

ABSTRACT This research will use a telephone survey of North American dialects of English to trace the development of linguistic changes in progress on a broad geographic scale. Telephone interviews offer a rapid and inexpensive method of sampling broad geographic areas with a sampling density proportionate to the variation in the data. The survey will establish a network of native speakers who are available for repeated interviews to obtain both phonetic and phonological information on a wide range of variables. The data obtained will be used to investigate general questions in the theory of language change, as well as provide national maps of the regional features of English. Current research on English dialects shows continued change and increasing diversification of broad regional patterns through chain shifts, mergers, lexical splits and the vocalization of liquids. A number of principals have been proposed to account for the geographic spread and transmission of these changes across generations, including specific quantitative models for areal diffusion. Efforts to confirm these models have been limited so far to sociolinguistic studies of small areas; the regional data that has been gathered is dispersed over time and space in ways that inhibit comparison. Furthermore, the traditional methods of dialectology do not gather the information on perception and categorization of speech needed to investigate the mechanism of phonological change, and the traditional focus on rural communities does not provide the data needed to investigate the correlation between community size and the advancement of change. Results of a pilot survey of the North Central States show considerable success in recruiting a number of subjects and in obtaining phonetic and phonological information that shows clear regional differentiation of sound changes in progress. Current methods of instrumental analyses of telephone recordings provide data of sufficient quantity and internal reliability to map individual vowel systems. An extended survey of the Middle Western United States will be conducted from the eastern boundary of Ohio westward to the Continental Divide and from the Ohio River northward to the Canadian border. The survey will gather data that will trace the progress and mechanism of the Northern Cities vowel shift, its relation to the southern vowel shift, the merger of long and short open /0/, ongoing mergers before liquids and nasals, and the lexical distribution of the tensing of short a and o in those regions where splits have occurred in the past. The sample will be representative of both geography and the population size of communities. The basic unit of sampling will be areas of influence of the largest urbanized centers as established by newspaper circulation.

本研究将对北美英语方言进行电话调查，以在广泛的地理范围内追踪语言变化的发展。电话访谈提供了一种快速和廉价的方法，对广泛的地理区域进行抽样，抽样密度与数据的变化成比例。这项调查将建立一个以英语为母语的人的网络，这些人可以进行反复的访谈，以获得关于各种变量的语音和语音信息。获得的数据将用于调查语言变化理论中的一般问题，以及提供英语区域特征的国家地图。目前对英语方言的研究表明，通过连锁转移、合并、词汇分裂和液体发声，广泛的区域模式不断变化和多样化。已经提出了一些原则来解释这些变化的地理分布和代际传播，包括区域扩散的具体定量模型。迄今为止，证实这些模型的努力仅限于小区域的社会语言学研究；收集到的区域数据分散在时间和空间上，不利于比较。此外，传统的方言方法没有收集到研究语音变化机制所需的感知和语音分类信息。传统的对农村社区的关注并不能提供调查社区规模与变革进程之间关系所需的数据。在中北部各州进行的一项试点调查的结果显示，在招募一些科目和获取语音和语音信息方面取得了相当大的成功，这些信息显示出声音变化过程中的明显区域差异。目前的电话录音仪器分析方法提供了足够数量和内部可靠性的数据来绘制单个元音系统。将对美国中西部进行一次扩展调查，从俄亥俄州东部边界向西到大陆分水岭，从俄亥俄河向北到加拿大边界。调查将收集数据，追踪北部城市元音转移的进展和机制，它与南部元音转移的关系，长和短开放/0/的合并，在液体和鼻音之前正在进行的合并，以及短a和o的张紧在过去发生分裂的地区的词汇分布。样本将具有地理和社区人口规模的代表性。抽样的基本单位将是由报纸发行量确定的最大的城市化中心的影响区域。