PAC 2021 – Spoken English varieties: redefining and representing realities, communities and norms

The 15th edition of the PAC international conference (Phonology of Contemporary English: usages, varieties, structure) is structured around three days of plenary sessions, thematic workshops as well as a poster session. The following areas of interest fall within the scope of PAC'21: (i) interdisciplinary concerns in the description and modelling of spoken varieties in the contemporary English-speaking world; (ii) more specifically, the interplay of social, psychological and cultural factors in phonological and phonetic variation and change (both at the dialectal and sociolectal levels); (iii) the sociolinguistic investigation of new norms within spoken English, drawing upon the central notions of indexicality, self-perception and perception of speakers' linguistic environments and communities; (iv) representations of native and non-native English-speaking communities and their relationship to traditional standard varieties. The notion of representation will be examined along three perspectives: 1. from the speaker's perspective, the construction of linguistic and cultural identities; speakers' perception of a linguistic environment and the sociocultural values attached to it; 2. from the researcher's perspective, the examination of i) the criteria and parameters of linguistic representations as devised by communities of speakers; ii) historical and contemporary conditions of the demographic, social and cultural dynamics of linguistic communities; 3. from the artistic and stylistic perspectives, the ways in which the representations of linguistic and social identities in audiovisual and/or literary productions feed the representations that speakers themselves have and produce of their own cultural, linguistic and social identities, and vice versa, which may notably question the issues of authenticity and stereotyping. Relevant topics for the PAC 2021 conference include, but are not limited to, the following issues (in alphabetical order): - comparative analyses of spoken corpora - computational methods for the analysis of spoken datasets - corpus phonology and the phonology-phonetics interface - the contribution of authentic data to empirical approaches in phonology - describing and modelling intonational variation in varieties of spoken English - descriptive approaches to language change and variation based on data from L1/L2 speakers - the development of new sociolects and dialects in time and space - the dynamics of linguistic communities and representativeness of spoken data - evaluating methods for L2 pronunciation teaching - the formation and transformations of language communities - (human and automatic) assessment of L2 pronunciation - the impact of regional and social factors on rhythmic patterns in spoken English - the internal dynamics of spoken English between stability and variation - intersectional issues in empirical phonology - learners' representations of English teaching norms - modelling the acquisition of L2 phonology - motivation and self-efficacy in L2 speech productions - multifocal levels of exploration of speech corpora for linguistic enquiry - phonostylistics, the representations of identities and attitudes towards such representations - prosodic variation and perceptive distinctiveness - prosodic and sociolinguistic variation: examining prosodic variables for a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of variation - psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic approaches to native and learner corpora of English - standards/evolution of the social correlates of phonological/phonetic change - theoretical models for speech variation - varieties of spoken English in the light of speech processing technology. Submission of papers: We invite the submission of abstracts for oral talks and posters. The official language of the conference is English. Allotted time for oral talks: 20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion.