English corpus phonology: variable phonological patterns in natural discourse

Sabine Arndt-Lappe and Sebastian Hoffmann

Timeline: since 2018

This corpus-linguistic project studies a range of so-called connected-speech phenomena in naturally occurring discourse. One important focus is the analysis of the audio and phonetic transcription data that were recorded as part of the British National Corpus (BNC) in the early 1990s. Another focus lies on exploiting large-scale written corpora for the comparative study of connected speech phenomena in varieties of English.

Publications

Arndt-Lappe, Sabine & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2022. Comparing approaches to phonological and orthographic corpus formats: Revisiting the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation. To appear in Ole Schützler & Julia Schlüter. Eds. Comparative Approaches to Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffmann, Sebastian, Sabine Arndt-Lappe & Peter Uhrig. 2022. Rhythm in World Englishes – Evidence from a Quantitative Analysis of Co-occurrence Patterns in Corpora of L1 and L2 Varieties of English. Submitted.

Hoffmann, Sebastian & Sabine Arndt-Lappe. 2021. Better data for more researchers — using the audio features of BNCweb. ICAME Journal 45 (2021). Open access.

Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2018. Audio data search for BNCweb, CQP edition. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/BNCweb/

Conference papers

Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2021. Rhythm in World Englishes: A look at the interaction of phonology and lexico-grammar from a corpus-based perspective. Keynote, Symposium on Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr2021), Edge Hill University (virtual), 2.–3.7.2021.

Arndt-Lappe, Sabine. 2021. Frequency, variability, and the productivity of phonological rules – what can we learn from variable stress alternations in English? Keynote, 18th Annual Meeting of the French Phonology Network (RFP 18 2021), Université d’Auvergne (virtual), 1.–2.7.2021.

Arndt-Lappe, Sabine & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2021. Thirteen men and a drunken sailor – revisiting the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation through an auditory analysis of authentic spoken language. Paper accepted for presentation at the 6th ISLE Conference (International Society for the Linguistics of English), Joenssu (Finland), 2.–6.6.2021.

Hoffmann, Sebastian, Sabine Arndt-Lappe & Valérie Keppenne. 2018. Exploring the Potential and the Limitations of the Audio Edition of the 1994 Spoken BNC. Paper presented at ICAME 39, University of Tampere, 30.5.–3.6.2018.

Conference

English Corpus Phonetics and Phonology at ICAME. Workshop organised by Sabine Arndt-Lappe and Sebastian Hoffmann, held at the 41st Annual ICAME Conference. Heidelberg / Trier, 20.5.2020 (digital, https://patterns.uni-trier.de/CorpPhon20/).