Dennis R. Preston

editor of A Reader is Soiciophonetics

November 4, 2015

Dennis R. Preston (Regents Professor, Oklahoma State University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been visiting professor at the Universities of Indiana Southeast, SUNY Oswego, Hawaii, Arizona, Michigan, Copenhagen, and Berkeley and Fulbright Senior Researcher in Poland and Brazil and is currently a Co-Director of the recently established Center for Oklahoma Studies at Oklahoma State University. He was Co-Director of the 1990 Teachers of English as a Second Language (TESOL) Institute and Director of the 2003 Linguistic Society of America Institute, both at Michigan State. He was President of the American Dialect Society (2001-02) and has served on the Executive Boards of that society, the International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, New Ways of Analyzing Variation, and the Linguistic Society of America, as well as the editorial boards of Language, Impact, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Kwartalkik Filologiczny, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Compass, and as a reader for numerous other journals, publishers, and granting agencies. His work focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectology, particularly the revitalization of folk linguistics and perceptual dialectology and variationist accounts of second language acquisition. He has directed four recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and two in language variation and change and was a member of the International Advisory Committee for the LANCHART (Language Change in Real Time) project at the University of Copenhagen and the sociolinguistic survey of Helsinki. He is invited frequently for presentations in both academic and popular venues. His most book-length publications in the last 10 years are, with Daniel Long, A handbook of perceptual dialectology, Volume II (2002); with Nancy Niedzielski, Folk linguistics (2003); Needed research in American dialects (2003); with Nancy Brian Joseph and Carol G. Preston, Linguistic diversity in Michigan and Ohio (2005); with James Stanford, Variation in indigenous languages (2009); and, with Nancy Niedzielski, A reader in sociophonetics (2010). He is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Faculty Award and the Paul Varg Alumni Award of the College of Arts and Letters, both at Michigan State.

Sociophonetics is one of the sub-branches of the discipline that has attracted a great deal of attention over the last decade. Recent advances in speech science and their technological simulations allow increasingly sophisticated studies of the progress of language contact and change. These studies, particularly those at the level of pronunciation, show that language variety is robust and socially embedded in interesting ways. Instrumental studies of language variety contact and change have focused on the role of social categories and attitudes in variety perception as well as production. Some of the studies presented in this volume look at the specific role of social factors in the formation, progress, and deterrence of intralingual contact and change; while others look at the ways in which social identities and beliefs influence a listener's ability to identify and comprehend varieties. These studies use detailed acoustic analyses of production speech data and of responses to samples of data based on such analyses. Although the book assumes some knowledge of basic acoustics and variationist studies, the general introduction plus chapter and section introductions provide a review of practices in the field, including those of collection, analysis, and interpretation.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2011-honorees/dennis-preston

Last Updated: 14 January 2022