Inducing phonetics from dialect variation

Structuralists famously observed that language is "un syst^ eme o^ u tout se tient" (Meillet, 1903, p. 407), insisting that the system of relations of linguistic units was more important than their concrete content. This study attempts to derive content from relations, in particular phonetic content from the system of alternative pronunciations used in dierent geographical varieties. It proceeds from data documenting language variation, examining two dialect atlases each containing the phonetic transcriptions of the same set of words at hundreds of sites. We collect the correspondences via an alignment procedure, and then apply an information-theoretic measure, pointwise mutual information, assigning smaller segment distances to segments which frequently correspond. We iterate alignment and information-theoretic distance assignment until both stabilize and we evaluate the quality of the phonetic distances obtained by comparing them to acoustic vowel distances. For both Dutch and German, we nd strong correlations between the induced pho

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