Variation through Accommodation: Individual, Contextual, and Regional Traces of Phonetic Alignment in Interaction

This thesis examines phonetic variation in interactions between speakers in two regions of Jutland. Through a range of approaches to measuring accommodation, variation is investigated across speaking conditions, linguistic levels, and recording times. The main finding of the investigation is maintenance; however, traces of phonetic alignment are found along the three axes of the individual, the contextual, and the regional.

Data for the investigation was gathered through a specialised map task, where speakers – all Teacher Education students from the University Colleges in Hjørring and Jelling – partnered with a fellow student of their choice to complete the task. Additionally, each speaker read a list of landmark words both before and after the task and also engaged in individual interviews with the researcher.

The interviews serve as the basis for the development of two measures of speaker personality: a Reported Gregariousness Matrix, based on speakers’ reported behaviour, and a measure of talkativeness, calculating the number of words a speaker says per speaking turn, representing actual behaviour. The map task data is used to characterise the dynamics between the speakers in a dyad. Lastly, speakers’ statements on their language use and the language of their region are employed to characterise the two research sites as linguistic and geographic places.

The first study in the investigation presents two approaches to measuring vowel differences: overlap and distance. A general finding of the overlap analysis is that speakers decrease their overlap in the course of the interaction, indicating divergence. In contrast, the vowel distance measure found that some speakers converge with their partner as a result of the interaction. Speakers showed different convergence patterns, also within the map task, where the findings were less uniform.

A study on three sociolinguistic variables associated with Jutlandic – (-or-), (-æg), and (- eu-) – found no signs of accommodation, and those who used the non-standard variants did so consistently across contexts. There was, however, regional dispersion in how the variables are used. The non-standard variant of (-or-) was the most widespread and was found in both Jelling and Hjørring. The non-standard pronunciation of (-æg) was only found in Hjørring, while the non-standard variant of (-eu-) was only found in Jelling, where it was used by three out of six participants.

The third study employs a method that compares the amplitude envelopes of two tokens of the same word said by the speakers in a dyad to measure acoustic similarity. 317 The findings suggest acoustic alignment between dyads during the map task or a general style difference between reading and conversing. There was no general finding of convergence from the pre-task to the post-task condition.

The final analysis presents the results of an AXB study that tested the perceptual similarity of the words used in the acoustic similarity test. In the AXB study, 68 listeners rated the similarity of token pairs of the landmark words. Listeners found general convergence between speakers from the pre-task to the post-task condition, suggesting that alignment during the map task carries over into the post-task reading. Another part of the analysis compared the ratings of word list items and map task items, finding that listeners rated speakers’ map task items as sounding more similar to their partner’s map task items than to the speaker’s word list items, suggesting style differences.

The investigation found traces of phonetic variation along the three axes examined: speakers with the highest talkativeness scores showed more signs of convergence, particularly in the vowel difference analysis. Throughout the studies, qualitative differences emerged between Hjørring and Jelling, as well as stylistic variations between reading and interacting. The acoustic and perceptual measures did not agree on the findings, suggesting that different processes are at play. The thesis concludes by proposing the concept of “phonetic sensibility” to describe speakers who accommodate, and encouraging variationist linguists to consider interaction as an essential site of variation.