Investigating regional variation in British English using Big Data: new applications for forensics and criminal justice

关于英国英语在口音和方言方面的区域差异，已经有很多研究。这类研究主要关注说话人的元音和辅音以及词汇和语法特征的使用。同样，我们开始看到对“片段之上的特征”的变化的研究，即韵律（例如语调或“语音旋律”）（Nance et al. 2015），节奏（Fuchs 2016）和语音质量（Szakay & Torgersen 2015））。这些研究的主要弱点是它们局限于一个或很少几个地方。我们仍然对当代全国范围内的大规模变异知之甚少，也不知道这些个体研究如何结合在一起，形成一幅全国性的方言图景。

There has been much research dedicated to regional variation of British English with regards to both accent and dialect. Such research is primarily concerned with speakers' vowels and consonants and the use of lexical items and grammatical features. Similarly, we are beginning to see research into the variation of 'features above the segments', i.e. prosody (e.g. intonation or 'speech melody') (Nance et al. 2015), rhythm (Fuchs 2016), and voice quality (Szakay & Torgersen 2015)). The major weakness of these studies is that they are localised to one or very few places. We still know very little about contemporary large-scale variation at national level, and about how these individual studies mesh together into a nationwide picture of the dialect landscape of the country.