This well-structured book offers an interdisciplinary study of two sociophonetic variables in Dublin English, namely the realisation of /ai/ in pragmatic marker like and word-final /t/. In so doing, it contributes to a growing body of third-wave sociolinguistic research by investigating the relationship between the social factors of gender, residence, and occupation and the more dynamic aspect of stance-taking in interaction.
In the introductory chapter, Schulte makes clear her intention to explore the possible correlations between phonetic variants and both macro-level social factors and micro-level contextual factors. The literary review of this study illustrates the need for investigations that integrate sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and phonetics, as well as both synchronic and diachronic analyses of linguistic data. While reviewing extensive research on these different fields, she highlights the importance of considering individual communicative situations when analysing the social meanings of linguistic variants, arguing that the stances that speakers take in interaction influence their choice of linguistic variants.
Two datasets are analysed: the main one consists of nineteen semiguided interviews with male and female informants grown up in Dublin, and the second dataset is a corpus made up of a selection of audio and video recordings drawn from the RTÉ Archives. The interview data is subjected to synchronic acoustic phonetic analysis for which Praat is used. Meanwhile, the RTÉ corpus, which is divided into four time periods (1930–1949, 1950–1969, 1970–1989, and 1990–2011), is examined diachronically using auditory analysis. In addition to quantitative phonetic analysis, Schulte also carries out qualitative content analysis of the interviews to identify main topics and interviewees’ stances towards them.
Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the sociophonetic and sociopragmatic analyses of the Dublin English variables /ai/ and word-final /t/ respectively. Chapter 6 starts with a qualitative analysis of pragmatic marker like in the interviews, which is followed by the acoustic phonetic analysis of four functions of like, namely pragmatic, grammatical, quotative, and verbal. Results from these analyses show that the use and phonetic realisation of like depend on its function and on the stances that speakers take. In chapter 7, findings from the diachronic and synchronic analyses of realisations of word-final /t/ suggest that the indexical meanings of the fricative variant have changed over time, with frication coming to be associated with an Irish identity, formality, prestige, and stances of authority from the end of the twentieth century onwards.
This book takes interdisciplinarity to the next level by combining sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and phonetics and is therefore a must-read for scholars interested in exploring the intersection between these fields of study. Furthermore, even though Schulte concentrates on Dublin English, she discusses her findings in light of World Englishes and global language ideologies, which makes her study interesting for researchers in dialectal variation. This book is also suitable for (socio)linguists, especially phoneticians, who want to analyse their data using statistical models since it provides good examples of how to carry out statistical analyses of acoustic phonetic data using RStudio. Moreover, these analyses are supplemented by a variety of useful plots.
