8 - Sociophonetics and Its Methodological Future

Summary

Chapter 8 returns to a focus on methods in sociophonetics, considering the ways that sociophonetics has been and can be integrated with corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and natural language processing.The chapter considers the turn towards “big data” across the social and hard sciences and the ways that technological improvements and software developments (both for data analysis and data acquisition) have fueled the development of sociophonetics and paved the way for rapid methodological advancements and substantive breakthroughs.In its treatment, the chapter surveys the present state-of-the-art (e.g. forced alignment, automatic formant extraction) and upcoming developments, and weighs the pros and cons of these new approaches.In doing this, it provides a thorough treatment of some less often discussed methodological concerns underlying the present and future of the field.