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Posted on 11 June 2017

Hofstra hosts three University of York visitors

PhD student James Tompkinson, whose research is on the phonetic properties of threatening and aggressive speech, spent five weeks at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York, at the invitation of forensic linguists Dr. Tammy Gales and Prof. Rob Leonard. Gales and Leonard both specialise in the linguistic analysis of threat communications, but focus principally on threats in written form. Their exploration of the resemblances and differences between spoken and written threats, whether simulated or authentic, was of great benefit to both James and to members of the Hofstra team, and it is hoped that collaborative research on threats and other types of language crimes will continue in this fruitful way across the two institutions. James also ran a highly successful two-day workshop on forensic phonetics, at which faculty and students had the opportunity to learn some of the skills needed for forensic speech analysis using the Praat package.

Following their presentations at the conference of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN 2017; see below), Carmen Llamas and Dom Watt joined James for five days to attend Hofstra's intensive training course in forensic linguistics, threat assessment and strategic analysis, a yearly event run jointly by Prof. Leonard and Dr. Jim Fitzgerald, a former supervisory special agent for the FBI. The course involved lectures on theoretical and methodological aspects of the work carried out by governmental and academic forensic linguists and threat assessors in the United States, in combination with group practical work based on the analysis of case materials from investigations carried out by the FBI and other law enforcement/intelligence agencies over the past twenty years.

The HiSoN conference, the theme of which was 'Examining the social in historical sociolinguistics: Methods and theory', was a two-day event hosted by the City University of New York and New York University. Carmen and Dom gave a talk - co-authored with Peter French, Almut Braun and Duncan Robertson - entitled 'The effects of assimilation and host community structure on the properties of linguistic varieties in historical dialect contact contexts', which is one of the first outputs from the TUULS project. Dom then gave a paper co-authored by Paul Foulkes called 'Conflict-induced contact: What might it have contributed to the twentieth-century history of English?'. The paper was based upon a chapter by Dom and Paul in a new volume 'Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English', edited by Raymond Hickey and published earlier this month by Cambridge University Press. The volume also contains contributions by Paul Kerswill and Márton Sóskuthy.

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