Wednesday 30 April 2014

Another Change in Contact Details

Nicholas no longer works for the University of Manchester and, as a result, his email address there no longer works. The best way to contact Nicholas (if you don't already have a private email address, Facebook or other method of contact) would be to fill in the "contact form" on the right-hand side of the blog main screen to send a private message.

Conference Presentations 2014

Nicholas was pleased to once again attend the Northern Englishes Workshop, which this year, in its 6th iteration, returned to the University of Lancaster.

Findings from the Leverhulme-funded sociolinguistics project Regional language variation and the indexical field at the University of Manchester, for which Nicholas was employed as Research Associate were presented, in a talk entitled "Social mean(ing)s in the North, the South and Scotland" given by Erik Schleef (lead author and project PI) and Nicholas Flynn. The presentation looked at listener attitudes to and evaluations of pronunciations of (ing) as '-in' / [ɪn] and '-ing' / [ɪŋ], and considered whether these were the same in the south of England, the north of England and Scotland.

The findings of the project on (ing) will be further disseminated in a joint-authored oral presentation by Erik Schleef and Nicholas Flynn at the 3rd International Society for the Linguistics of English conference (ISLE3), to be held at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) in August.

Nicholas has also been invited to contribute to a workshop session on methods of studying vocalic variation which forms part of the programme of the 15th Methods in Dialectology conference, an international conference held every three years, which in 2014 is being held at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Nicholas's talk is entitled "Potential pitfalls when choosing to normalise" and will look at the importance of researchers making informed decisions when normalising and measuring vowel formants to avoid errors.