100 Years of Continuity and Change in Spoken British English

这个合作的博士项目将从大英图书馆声音档案的历史馆藏中编译一个历时性的录音语料库，这是一个无与伦比的跨越一个世纪的自然英国演讲的收藏。语料库设计的目标是在地域、注册和人口因素之间进行平衡选择，同时最大限度地提高时间深度。使用这个独特的语料库，该项目将调查语言变化研究中的基本理论挑战：随着时间的推移，在英国英语中观察到的变化中，语言因素、频率和社会因素的相对重要性是什么？到目前为止，由于缺乏足够时间深度的音频档案，这个问题很难完全解决。最近的历史语料库已经开始弥补这一点，导致了一些关于频率在语音变化中的作用的意想不到的发现（Hay et al. 2015），并加剧了关于频率在大规模方言变化中的相对作用的争论（Labov 2010; Kiparsky 2016）。一个实质性的历时语料库也将允许更深入地研究相关主题，如方言稳定性、变化中的社会因素（年龄、人口、性别、阶级）和变化中的共变。

This collaborative doctoral project will compile a diachronic corpus of sound recordings from the historicholdings of the British Library Sound Archive, an unparalleled collection of natural British speechspanning over a century. The corpus design will aim for a balanced selection across region, register anddemographic factors while maximising time depth. Using this unique corpus, the project will investigate afundamental theoretical challenge in the study of language change: What is the relative importance oflinguistic factors, frequency and social factors in changes observed in British English over time?This question has been difficult to address fully so far due to the lack of audio archives with sufficient timedepth. Recent historical corpora have begun to remedy this, leading to some unexpected findingsregarding the role of frequency in phonetic change (Hay et al. 2015) and intensifying the debate over therelative role of frequency in large-scale dialect change (Labov 2010; Kiparsky 2016). A substantialdiachronic corpus will also permit deeper investigation of related themes such as vernacular stability,social factors in change (age, demographics, gender, class) and co-variation in change.