English 309
Spring, 2006

Project assignment sheet: Part II
Analysis of speech sounds.

Due date: Feb. 24, 2006

The assignment must be typed--I assume on a computer. Phonetic transcription may be hand-written.

Goal: The goal of this part of the project is to analyze a vocal aspect of your corpus.

Transcribe your corpus. You have fifteen minutes of speech on tape. Choose from the list below what you will analyze, and transcribe only that section in Standard English (do not try to indicate accent, dialect, or idiolect here, but do punctuate). This part of the assignment is not phonetic transcription. None of these choices will require transcription of the entire corpus. You will transcribe ten seconds, thirty seconds, or the dialogue of one speaker.

Analyze your corpus. Choose one of these methods of analysis, not all of them. Some of them may not be applicable to your corpus. You do one of these in addition to the Standard English transcription above.

1. Isolate ten seconds of speech and transcribe it phonetically. Work from your tape, not from your Standard English transcription. Transcribe it as it is actually spoken; do not "correct" it. Indicate the way your speaker(s) said it, not how you might say it. If your transcription is read aloud, the reader should sound exactly like the person or persons in your sample, accent, dialect, idiolect, and all.

2. If you can recognize an accent, dialect, or idiolect in your corpus, analyze it. For example, if you recognize that a speaker has a French accent, point out the details of that person's speech which tell you so. If a speaker is British, what features of his or her speech indicate that? Idiolect is more difficult to pinpoint unless the speaker is different enough from most speakers of his/her dialect that s/he would be recognizable were a professional imitator to "do" him or her.

3. Identify the vocal inflections you hear in a thirty-second segment of your corpus. Indicate what each one means, and explain which ones indicate meaning that cannot be seen in your transcription in Standard English.

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