Research Centre for Romance Linguistics

Dr Elinor Payne became interested in Romance Linguistics while studying Italian and Spanish (with a little bit of Portuguese and Romanian) at Cambridge University, and went on to do a Ph.D. in Italian Experimental Phonetics (completed 2000). She then worked in Government for a while (London and Brussels), and returned to Cambridge to take up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Linguistics Department, and was a Junior Fellow of Wolfson College. For the last two years she has had a part-time Lecturership in Phonetics and Phonology at UCL, while also working part-time for the Government's Office of Science and Innovation.
She has recently taken up a University Lecturership in Phonetics and Phonology at Oxford, where she is also a Fellow of St Hilda's and a College Lecturer in Linguistics at Oriel. Though her research has extended to other languages (e.g. Cypriot Greek and Arabic), she retains a particular interest in Romance Languages, especially Italian and Italo-Romance dialects.

Scientific Interests

Her research is in the field of phonetics and experimental phonology, with interests in speech production (gemination, coarticulation, connected speech); phonetic and phonological theory (especially sound change, speech patterns - or 'motifs' - and how these become imprinted on phonological structure); and prosody (especially intonation and its interface with syntax).

Some current research projects

Acquisition of rhythm in Catalan, Castilian, and English (grant funded by Batista i Roca Foundation, project led by Pilar Prieto and in conjunction with Brechtje Post, Lluïsa Astruc, and Maria del Mar Vanrell);
Investigation of 'focus' in Sicilian Italian (funded by the British Academy, and in conjunction with Raffaella Folli, at the University of Ulster);
Indices of rhythmic variation in varieties of Italian (in conjunction with Laurence White and Sven Mattys, at the University of Bristol);
Cross-dialect variation in the production of Arabic geminates (in conjunction with Zeki Hassan).

Selected Publications

- Payne, E. (2007) Review of research published in 2005 on Italian phonetics and phonology, for MHRA's The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies.
- Payne, E. & E. Eftychiou (2006) "Prosodic Shaping of Consonant Gemination in Cypriot Greek" Phonetica 63: 175-198.
- Payne, E. (2006) "Non-durational indices of Italian geminates: an EPG study" Journal of the International Phonetic Association 36(1): 83-95.
- Payne, E. (2006) "Phonetic motifs and the formation of sound structure" UCL Working Paper in Linguistics 18: 321-343.
- Folli, R. & E. Payne (2006) "Investigating interfaces: an experimental approach to focus in Sicilian Italian" in Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, Athens 2006.
- Payne, E. (2006) Review of research published in 2003-2004 on Italian phonetics and phonology, for MHRA's The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies.
- Payne, E. (2005) "Phonetic variation in Italian consonant gemination" Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35(2): 153-189.
- Payne, E. (2005) "Effetti emotivi sulla realizzazione di strutture intonative" Atti del Convegno Nazionale del Gruppo di Studio sulla Comunicazione Parlata della SLI (Società di Linguistica Italiana) - GSCP 2004
- Payne, E. (2005) "Rises and rise-plateau-slumps in Trevigiano" Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, vol. II: 173-186.