PAC programme

Transcription conventions

Hugo Chatellier — 2019-04-20T16:20:36Z

SOT and turn-taking

There are important basic conventions established within the programme in order to achieve uniform transcriptions. Researchers should abide by these conventions in order to guarantee the comparability of the data.

PAC researchers transcribe under Praat, using standard orthography. Each speaker receives their own tier which is named after their initials (eg. JC1_SOT).
Interval boundaries are added according to the logic of turn-taking (a new interval for each new turn or for backchanneling - typically fillers such as "yeah, really, oh" and laughter, vocal or other noises uttered by the speaker/listener).

However, if stretches within boundaries are too long, a true phonemic/phonetic alignment may prove difficult at a later stage. We therefore request that interval units should not normally exceed 15 seconds. No carriage returns are used under Praat.

Simplified punctuation

The punctuation system is simplified: the full stop, the comma, and the question mark are the only symbols from traditional spelling used for the transcription of discourse in the project.

Commas indicate a brief pause in the discourse, or a ‘non-final', ‘continuing' intonation contour marked by a shift in pitch or other cues.
I don't know what to do with it, I mean I've never looked at a language that way, which is sort of going out and not knowing anything.

Full stops stand for a relatively long pause in the discourse, or for a ‘final' intonation contour.
So I was home. I won the airline tickets.

A question mark is inserted at the end of a question.
How many of these are you going to have?

NB:
– Pauses and intonation contours do not always coincide with expectations based on written syntax.
– Pauses and intonation units are not distinguished along rigorous lines in the orthography employed here: such a finer supra-segmental transcription remains an optional subsequent task.
– Commas are used between repeated words or expressions.
– An exceptionally long pause in an otherwise logically/syntactically coherent sequence will be indicated by a parenthetical comment in between {}.

Truncation of words

A dash (followed by a space) indicates unfinished words:

You think you have this demo- democratic freedom but it's, not really there.
The col- the faculty are looking for a good fit.

Truncated intonation units (when speakers do not finish their train of thought, are interrupted, or hesitate, etc.) are marked by a comma or a full stop:

you know I am an American but, I don't, I'm not like, §yeah I'm an American§ you know.

Repetition

Repeated words or expressions are separated by a comma.

I, I like to go skiing in the snow, but I don't want to have to dig my way out of it every day.
I think it's true that, that, there is racism in, racism in, in California but it's really well-hidden.

NB: Commas mark repetition and short pauses in the discourse. Thus, in the following example, the first comma stands for a short pause, the second for a repetition, the third indicates a repetition that coincides with a short pause at the same time, and the fourth one marks a short pause:

Uh, it's okay it's you know it's, it's really, it's really weird teaching you know, I don't know.

Parentheses

Observations made by the transcriber on non-linguistic aspects of the interaction (noises, stammering, etc.) and on the recording (background action, quality problems) are placed between curly brackets {}.

Laughter may also be indicated with the symbol @, or by @@ on both sides of the segment concerned:

That's at the beginning of the week so it's hard to remember. @ Uh, we read a couple of theoretical texts comparing irony to allegory,

It's @@ impossible @@ !

Unintelligible words are indicated by the capital letter X in parentheses, preceded by a *. The number of Xs inserted (ideally) corresponds to the number of incomprehensible syllables:

because not *(XX) all the cases are uh, show up in the pronoun system,

In cases where the transcriber thinks s/he has probably recognized a word (or sequence of words) but is not fully sure, the word is put in parentheses:

Maybe I'll stay in the technology sector, and uh hopefully do something with creativity, like maybe product design, or writing you know (maybe) marketing oriented, something like that. (laughter)

Reported Speech

Reported speech is transcribed between §:

And then when Bush said §read my lips no new taxes§ and then, you know,
And there was a woman at the other line and she said, §oh no message§, and so I was
and she said I had won the prize and I said §didn't you just call§

Some features of spoken English in relation to spelling

Obviously, many reductions and contractions occur in spontaneous speech. Contracted forms are used in our transcriptions only in so far as they are allowed in standard spelling. Note, in the following example, the co-occurrence of a non-contracted and a contracted form, the former bearing a slight emphasis.

Yeah I have heard that and also I've heard that he seems to be very needy of getting votes.

Sometimes non-contracted forms appear in a more formal style:

And were your parents from there?
My mom has lived in Los Angeles all her life.

Word internal ellipsis is an equally frequent feature of spoken English. To avoid a waste of energy at the initial stage of transcription, such deletions are not transcribed. The examination of these features is left to the phonological/phonetic stage of the analysis.

Some very, very intelligent young people, will apply but not do well here because they needed more structure. (and not ‘cause)
a portfolio for music, you know original music compositions (and not ‘riginal)

But note that we do not reintroduce words (or word sequences) which appear to have been missed out (in relation to normative - written - grammar). Thus if what we hear is:

Was she there?
Think so.

We do not transcribe:

Was she there?
I think so.

Realizations for which standard orthography offers distinctions will be transcribed accordingly. Thus the distinction between "yes" and "yeah" is systematically respected in the transcription:

I don't know. Yeah.
It's confusing.
It's confusing. @ Yes there, there's a lot involved and I think, to be, to say a real opinion on it you have, I have to be, really informed.
But do you feel now you're from California?
Yes.
That you're Californian?
Yes. I guess. @

Interjections are another characteristic feature of conversations, employed to express pain, surprise ('ouch', 'oops') etc., or simply to provide backchanneling (uh huh, oh, ah, hm). For these speech forms, we use the conventions put forward in the OED.

Most often, however, the speaker is simply using a filler to buy time while thinking, hesitating, or searching for an expression (hm, uhm, uh, er) etc. Regardless of the actual sound pronounced, this type of intervention will always be transcribed as ‘er' for British, and ‘uh' for American speech.

Er, it's, it's, er, yeah, it was quite a nice place er, *(XX) smelly in some places, the *(XX) particularly, er it's very run down and er
Uh, let's see, uh, I uh, I'm from L.A. and I let's say I've been moved uh always to magnet schools which are like schools that kind of specialize in one thing or another

Acronyms

Acronyms – pronounceable words made up from the initial letters of a multi-word name like, for example, UNESCO for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization – are written in the usual way: capital letters with no separation of any kind if the word is pronounced as a unit. If on the other hand it is spelled out letter by letter, this is indicated by typing an underscore after each letter of the word: U_N_E_S_C_O.

Any unexpected form of actual pronunciation will be indicated in between square brackets after the word in X-SAMPA transcription. X-SAMPA is an extension of SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet), a machine-readable phonetic alphabet developed by speech researchers from many different countries in the late eighties. It is to date the best international collaborative basis for a standard machine-readable encoding of phonetic notation mapping the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet onto ASCII codes. As with the ordinary IPA, a string of X-SAMPA symbols does not require spaces between successive symbols.

Dialectal expressions

Words or expressions that do not belong to either standard British or American English will be transcribed by using X-SAMPA symbols:

And, how, is he [tSEr]/, he'll be [tSEr\dZ n2]?

However, if there is a longer stretch of discourse in dialectal speech, "normal" spelling will be employed.

And, how, is he cher/, he'll be cherged noo?

If there is a reference dictionary of the dialect being described, its conventions should be used.

Reference orthographic systems

In our transcriptions, we apply the spelling system normally used in the country where the speakers live or come from. Thus, if we transcribe British varieties of English, we use standard British English conventions (adopted in the OED). If we transcribe American English, we use the conventions adopted in Webster's. Below is an example transcribed according to the British and the American conventions (respectively):

Standard British English:

he can't honour the guidelines of the debate, for even ninety minutes
when I was, I think, maybe thirteen, just travelling with my mum, and er

American English:

he can't honor the guidelines of the debate, for even ninety minutes
when I was, I think, maybe thirteen, just traveling with my mom, and uh

Anonymization

Proper names and other information allowing for the direct identification of speakers should appear in between $ so as to facilitate the process of anonymization at a later stage, which can be achieved thanks to a specific Praat script.

Common protocol

Sylvain Navarro — 2019-04-20T16:18:57Z

The common PAC protocol provides access to various speech styles, on a continuum from spontaneous/informal to monitored/formal for each speaker, by recording the following tasks:
– reading of two wordlists
– reading of a list of sentences
– reading of a text
– formal (semi-guided) interview
– informal conversation

Wordlists

The two wordlists in the PAC protocol include 192 items altogether and focus on segmental phenomena. The first wordlist tests the vowel system by notably presenting potential minimal pairs in a randomized order. The second wordlist does the same for the consonant system. Both lists allow for the study of rhoticity, vowel length, and the realization of /t/ (tapping, glottaling), among other phenomena. For more information on the relevance of the wordlists with regards to the programme's ambitions, see Brulard et al. (2015) and Carr et al. (2004).

Researchers in the different thematic groups are likely to add extra reading tasks to focus on more regionally specific phenomena. For further information, check the thematic research pages.

Sentences

The list of sentences includes 34 items reflecting a variety of syntactic structures. Within a given survey point, the order of the sentences should be randomized for each informant, in order to avoid repetitive intonation contours which sometimes occur over the first few items (see Bongiorno et al. to appear).

Text

The text is entitled "A Christmas interview". It is a two-page-long passage originally adapted from a newspaper article but substantially modified to hide its source and include a number of phonological and phonetic phenomena worth investigating, and notably post-lexical processes such as r-sandhi and assimilations.

Before the recording, informants may take a few minutes to read the text to themselves. This gives them a chance to run through the text and know what it is about, and thus be more at ease and perform better for the recording. This is important in order to guarantee the necessary fluidity for the study of connected speech processes.

Formal conversation

For both the formal and the informal conversations, we recommend that the first few minutes of recording be avoided for subsequent analysis as the informants often need a few minutes to be completely at ease with the task.

The formal (semi-guided) interview involves the fieldworker and the informant. It is based on the information sheet which establishes the sociolinguistic profile of each informant, and on the PAC-LVTI questionnaire which gathers information about the speaker's language, identity, work, and relationship to the area they live in.

Informal conversation

The informal conversation is recorded with two or three informants in the absence of the fieldworker. There are no topics or directions imposed on the conversation as its main goal is to provide access to the most spontaneous and casual speech style possible.

All in all, about 30 minutes of spontaneous speech should be recorded for each informant (at least 15 minutes of formal interview and 15 minutes of informal conversation) – a sufficient basis for the subsequent annotation and analysis of each speech style for each speaker, as required by the programme standards.

Information sheet

In order to build a comprehensive comparable database of speaker profiles, the PAC methodology requires for the fieldworker to enquire about the following:
– age
– gender
– place of birth
– place of residence
– family and ancestry
– occupation
– education
– leisure activities
among other personal information

LVTI sociolinguistic questionnaire

The PAC-LVTI sociolinguistic questionnaire includes questions about language, urban/post-urban environments, work, and identity which, along with the Information sheet, are used as a thematic basis for the formal/semi-guided interview.

Tools

Below are links to some of the tools we use within the PAC programme:

– Praat (Paul Boersma & David Weenink (2023): Praat: doing phonetics by computer)

– Phonometrica (Eychenne, Julien & Léa Courdès-Murphy (2019). Phonometrica: an open platform for the analysis of speech corpora. Proceedings of the Seoul International Conference on Speech Sciences 2019, Seoul National University, pp. 107-108.)

– SPPAS (Brigitte Bigi (2015). SPPAS - Multi-lingual Approaches to the Automatic Annotation of Speech. In "the Phonetician" - International Society of Phonetic Sciences, ISSN 0741-6164, Number 111-112 / 2015-I-II, pages 54-69.)

If you are interested in using the copyrighted PAC protocol for your fieldwork, feel free to contact us to enquire about PAC membership.

Presentation

Guillaume Wauquier — 2018-10-12T14:26:28Z

The PAC programme (Phonologie de l'Anglais Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure - The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure) is an interdisciplinary linguistic research programme coordinated by Sophie Herment (Aix-Marseille Université), Sylvain Navarro (Université Paris Cité), Anne Przewozny-Desriaux (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès) and Cécile Viollain (Université Paris Nanterre).

The main aims of the programme can be summarized as follows:
– to give a better picture of spoken English in its unity and diversity (geographical, social, and stylistic) on the basis of native and learner corpora;
– to test existing theoretical models in phonology, phonetics and sociolinguistics from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, making room for the systematic study of variation;
– to favour communication between specialists in speech, phonological and sociolinguistic theory;
– and to provide corpus-based data and analyses which will help improve the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Since 2004, what started as Jacques Durand's idea for a local team project in Toulouse has developed into a research programme with a national and international scientific community of senior and junior (PhD and Master's students) researchers, and regular international conferences and summer workshops.

It has done so by setting collaborative goals for the creation of a large database on contemporary oral English, including native corpora from a wide variety of linguistic areas in the English-speaking world, such as:
– the United Kingdom – Lancashire, Ayrshire, Birmingham, Manchester...
– the Republic of Ireland – Donegal, Dublin, Galway...
– Canada – Ontario, Quebec...
– Australia – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland...
– New Zealand – Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington...
– India – New Delhi...
– the USA – California, Boston, Michigan, Connecticut, Trenton, Murfreesboro, Ithaca...
as well as learner corpora from France, China, Italy and Spain.

The protocol used is shared by all researchers in every survey location and was inspired by a classical Labovian methodology. It revolves around reading tasks and conversational tasks. Each thematic research group can then add extra tasks to that common protocol.

Although significant corpora of oral English already exist, many of them have been conceived along exclusively sociolinguistic rather than explicitly phonological lines. In other cases, hardly any information is available on speakers beyond gender and geographical origin. And few corpora are based on a single methodology allowing for a fully comparative analysis of the data.

The approach chosen by the PAC programme was originally modelled on the French PFC programme (Phonologie du Français Contemporain – http://www.projet-pfc.net), founded by Jacques Durand (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), Bernard Laks (Université Paris Nanterre) and Chantal Lyche (University of Oslo), and has demonstrated how a corpus which was originally conceived for phonology can lend itself to many other types of linguistic exploitation: the lexicon, morphosyntax, prosody, pragmatics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, interactionism, natural language processing, perception studies, and cognitive psychology.

Management Board

Guillaume Wauquier — 2018-10-09T13:40:42Z

Jacques Durand Honorary President

See personal page
Jacques Durand is Emeritus Professor of English linguistics at the University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. He specializes in phonology and has published extensively on English and French. He is the co-founder of the PFC (Phonologie du français contemporain), PAC and LVTI research programmes. His recent collaborative publications include The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology (OUP), La prononciation de l'anglais contemporain dans le monde: variation et structure (PUM) and Varieties of Spoken French (OUP). He is the director of the Oxford series The Phonology of the World's Languages (OUP).

Sophie Herment

See personal page
Sophie Herment is full Professor in the department of English studies at Aix-Marseille University, France. She has taught English phonetics and phonology to French students at all levels of the university curriculum, including the teacher training programme, for 25 years. As a member of the speech and language lab (LPL, under the co-funding of the French national centre for research and the university), of which she is deputy director, she works mainly on prosody and her research interests concern L2 prosody, the varieties of English, the prosody/syntax interface and corpus prosody.

Sylvain Navarro

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Sylvain Navarro has been Associate Professor in English linguistics at the University of Paris Cité since September 2015. He defended his PhD thesis entitled “Rhoticity and ‘r'-sandhi in English: from Lancashire to Boston” at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès in September 2013. His research focuses on English phonology and the study of variation using large oral corpora. He has published a book on the phonology, history and variation of English /r/.

Anne Przewozny-Desriaux

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Anne Przewozny-Desriaux is Full Professor in English phonology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. As a phonologist and a specialist in Australian studies, her research interests include sound change and variation, sociohistorical reconstructions of Australian English, dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics as applied to contemporary English and Australian varieties, and a comparative sociophonological interpretation of English and French varieties towards a refined definition of contemporary linguistic communities.

Cécile Viollain

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Cécile Viollain is holder of an agrégation and Associate Professor in English linguistics at Paris Nanterre University. Her research interests include the sociolinguistic, phonological, and phonetic characteristics of the varieties of English spoken worldwide, notably in New Zealand, the epistemological and methodological issues relating to corpus phonology, and what is at stake with the representations of accents in TV series and movies.