Dec 8 ===== Hay/Drager:2007 --------------- We talked about this paper before, but a question that came to my mind while re-reading it was: To which degree are people conscious about whether they themselves adopted the phonetic characteristics of a speaker group? Do they notice the changes in their own speech? I also thought about the motivation of phonetic change - what are the reasons that a certain variant ends up winning over others in a speaker group, if the variation is arbitrary at first? A very wide and interesting overview, with some studies that seem almost a little dubious - "nerd girls" as a distinct social identity or the length of the eyeliner correlating with phonetic realization of a vowel (I am not saying they are debatable or wrong as I did not read those studies fully, but pretty surprising to hear which social and phonetic properties correlate with each other). Have the exemplar theoretic hypothesis been articulated more carefully and been tested between the paper an now? (Influence of place) In oder to make a great progress on the sociophonetics, for "Pushing the social agenda forward" and "Pushing the phonetic agenda forward" which one do you think is more important? In other words, how to better understand the phonetic variation in its social context. Hay and Drager argue for a more continuous analysis of phonetic variation in conjunction with ethnography studies, but it seems like often, tasks such as recognition or categorization, are pretty discrete. How does this tie into what they're proposing, and how do we determine which phonetic detail is actually important, i.e. prominent enough to shift perception? The authors state that the majority of phonetic variation which is produced by the speaker in order to express some sort of social meaning can hardly be perceived by the listener. How is it possible then that such a small variation can spread within a speech community and in how far is one individual listener able to interpret this social meaning as intended by the speaker? Speaking about phonetic variation in its discourse context, I would like to give another example. Sigmatism (or lisping) is differently considered across languages: in English it is a phonological disorder, in German it is an articulation disorder, in French it was an indicator of origin in 17th-18th centuries, in Russian it is a dialect feature, etc. Are there any other phenomena that are considered differently across languages? To make sure I understood it correctly, so pattern-driven research means to examine how linguistic and non-linguistic factors are correlated to see for example whether a particular phoneme can serve as a cue of a social identity and variable-driven means when for example manipulating a phoneme in recordings? Why should be pattern-driven the better option? How exactly is a "speech community" and an individual's membership in it defined, especially when individuals can be part of several different social environments? Is it even possible to clearly assign an individual to one specific community? I also would like to get more information about the methodology of an ethnographic approach. What exactly is considered and how are relevant social categories determined? Are there generally applicable procedures and guidelines (for example, whether certain categories have more weight than others)? "Listeners assign different personality traits, such as friendliness or reliability, to speakers of different dialects." (Hay&Drager, p. 96) On which factors does the association of positive or negative traits depend? Are there parallels between different groups of listeners? From Mendoza-Denton (1997) study, we found out that there are so many factor influencing the realizations of particular vowels. If speech perception is influenced by so unexpected factors such as wearing an eye-liner and the presence of a particular toy in the room, can we even define what most affects phonetic realization? Because it seems that everything can influence how we produce and perceive speech. In Podesva (2006) studies he "conducts a detailed study of the speech of three gay men across multiple contexts, showing how phonetic detail is used to construct social meaning." Was the orientatioin of the participants important for this study? What is the reason that /t/ phonetic variation is studied more than other consonants? The paper postulates testing for more precise social categories than "just" age, ethnicity, gender, and social class, and they point out very good arguments and examples. However, there are so many phonetic variables and pratically infinite social variables that could interact in a situation. How do researchers find suitable candidates that may make sense to test in experiments? On page 93, bar 2, paragraph 1, if we used ethnographic information over sociolinguistic information, would it still be classified as sociolinguistics, or would a branch called ethno-linguistics or anthro-linguistics be established if this was the norm? When developing sociophonetics studies with an ethnographic approach, how do you develop the research question? Since you don't know exactly what groups you're interested in studying because you're looking to let the data make these groups clear to you.