This volume materialises the many exchanges that took place during the PAC (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain/Phonology of Contemporary English) international conference entitled ‘Variation, Change and Spoken Corpora: Advances in the Phonology and Phonetics of Contemporary English’ at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France, in 2015. The chapters in this volume are not replicas of the talks that were given at the conference, as these are not proceedings. Rather, this volume is evidence to the open-ended nature of the research endeavour and to the beneficial role of the exchanges between researchers in fashioning and furthering the debate on many different issues.
Since 2004, what started as Jacques Durand’s idea for a local team project in Toulouse has developed into a research programme with a national and international scientific community, regular international conferences, and senior and junior researchers as well as PhD students. It has done so by setting collaborative goals for the creation of a large database on contemporary oral English, coming from a wide variety of linguistic areas in the English-speaking world (such as Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and the USA), and by acknowledging the need for a larger methodological and theoretical debate on the scientific legitimacy and relevance of corpus phonology as one of the many fields of linguistic research.
The phonological foundation for the PAC programme is best summarised as follows (Durand 2017):
Corpus Phonology, as indicated by the name, is an approach to phonology which places spoken corpora at the centre of phonological research. As a sub-branch of corpus linguistics it comes in two forms: a strong version that states that the study of spoken corpora should be the aim of phonology; a weaker version which stresses that corpora should occupy pride of place within the set of techniques available (for example, intuitions, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimentation, laboratory phonology, the study of the acquisition of phonology or of language pathology, etc.). Whether one defends a strong or a weak version, corpora are part and parcel of the modern research environment and their construction and exploitation has been modified by the multidisciplinary advances made within various fields.