Descrizione

On December 14th-15th, 2010, the international workshop “Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication” was held in Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, with the participation of eleven invited speakers and over ninety scholars coming from Europe, USA, Asia and Africa (http://linguistica.sns.it/Sociophonetics/home.htm). The local organizing committee, headed by Pier Marco Bertinetto and Chiara Celata from Scuola Normale Superiore and Silvia Calamai from Siena University, received forty submissions for poster presentation. The evaluation and reviewing of which could not have been achieved without the help of a small but generous scientific committee, composed by (in alphabetical order) Hans Basbøll, Gaetano Berruto, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Olle Engstrand, Alberto M. Mioni, Bruno Moretti and Daniel Recasens.

The twenty papers collected in this volume are a selection of the works that were presented as posters at the conference. By covering a broad range of topics and introducing different theoretical and experimental perspectives in sociophonetic research, they fully demonstrate the popularity of the conference, and the widespread need for the sharing of ideas within a truly international community.

We gratefully acknowledge all those who have contributed to producing these proceedings and in particular Pier Marco Bertinetto, Director of the Laboratorio di Linguistica “Giovanni Nencioni” at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, who supported our editorial initiative and pleaded the sociophonetic cause by the Edizioni della Normale publishing house.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Edda Farnetani (1936-2010).

Silvia Calamai, Chiara Celata, Luca Ciucci