PAC 2013: Spoken English Corpora: from annotation to interphonologies

We are pleased to announce that the PAC annual conference ‘Spoken English corpora: from annotation to interphonologies’ is due to take place from Thursday May 30 to Saturday June 1, 2013 and will be hosted by the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (http://www.lpl.univaix.fr/~PAC2013 , available soon) and the Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence.

The PAC Project (http://www.projet-pac.net), ‘La Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure; The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure’ is coordinated by Anne Przewozny, Philip Carr and Jacques Durand. Among other things it aims at:

·giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and diversity (geographical, social and stylistic);

·testing phonological and phonetic models from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, making room for the systematic study of variation,

·favouring communication between specialists in speech and in phonological theory,

·providing data and analyses which will help improve the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Papers from a wide range of theoretical perspectives addressing the above issues and related topics are welcome. Other things being equal, we will give priority to papers focusing on the relationship between corpus studies and the phonological/phonetic modelling of spoken English.

For the 2013 conference, we would particularly welcome proposals on the use of automatic tools for the study of very large data sets. One afternoon will be dedicated to a workshop on tools and annotation: Brigitte Bigi will present SPPAS, a tool to produce automatically phonetic annotations from a recorded speech sound and its orthographic transcription (http://aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~bigi/sppas/), and Sophie Herment will do a demo on Momel and Intsint for prosodic annotation.

We would also like to open perspectives on L2 research, with papers dealing with interphonologies and will organize a special session on this issue (see below).

The deadline for sending a title with a one-page abstract (excluding references) is extended to 22 February 2013. Please send your proposal in 2 files, one in .doc with name and affiliation, the other anonymous in .pdf to:

gabor.turcsan@univ-amu.fr & sophie.herment@univ-amu.fr

Please indicate whether you would prefer i. oral, ii. poster or iii. any type of presentation. Notification of acceptance will be sent by mid March.

Special session on interphonology

(organisers: V. Lacoste, N. Herry-Bénit & T. Kamiyama)

This special session offers to investigate the phonetic and phonological systems developed by non-native speakers/learners of English who have command of English either as a foreign language (EFL) or a second language (ESL) in various parts of the world and in different contexts of communication. Interphonology will be discussed both as a theoretical, linguistic construct and empirically by looking into aspects of the learners’ new phonological system, while in the process of establishing itself or when it has already been stabilised and/or regularised. Inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation will also be central to our study of interphonology to understand, for instance, how segmental variability is integrated in the newly developed phonological system and how the phonologies of two (or more) languages at work mutually influence each other. Finally, this panel hopes to bring together scholars from the field of variationist sociolinguistics and scholars from a more formal linguistic tradition to deepen our appreciation of interphonology as a phenomenon specifically from a learner’s perspective.

Local organisation team:

Carine André, Laurence Colombo, Stéphanie Desous, Sophie Herment, Valérie Kerfelec, Joëlle Lavaud, Claudia Pichon-Starke, Gabor Turcsan.

Scientific committee:

Cyril Auran, Université de Lille 3, France

Nicolas Ballier, Université Paris 7 Diderot, France

Joan Beal, University of Sheffield, England

Ricardo Bermudez-Otero, University of Manchester, England

Brigitte Bigi, LPL, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

Philip Carr, University of Montpellier III, France

Sylvain Detey, Waseda University, Japan

Jacques Durand, CLLE-ERSS, University of Toulouse II, France

Jean-Michel Fournier, University of Tours, France

Martine Faraco, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Ulrike Gut, Münster University, Germany

Silke Hamann, Düsseldorf University, Germany

Sophie Herment, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Nadine Herry-Bénit, Université Paris 8, France

Daniel Hirst, LPL, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

Patrick Honeybone, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Takeki Kamiyama, Université Paris 8, France

Mariko Kondo, Waseda University, Japan

Véronique Lacoste, University of Freiburg, Germany

Noël Nguyen, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Peter Prince, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Anne Przewozny, Université Toulouse II, France

Jane Stuart-Smith, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Gabor Turcsan, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France