Supporting Data for: Investigating the covariation of features in ‘crowded’ vowel spaces – A corpus-based study of BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish Englishdoi:10.18710/EYUPMEDataverseNO2026-08-261Schützler, Ole, 2026, "Supporting Data for: Investigating the covariation of features in ‘crowded’ vowel spaces – A corpus-based study of BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish English", https://doi.org/10.18710/EYUPME, DataverseNO, V1Supporting Data for: Investigating the covariation of features in ‘crowded’ vowel spaces – A corpus-based study of BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish Englishdoi:10.18710/EYUPMESchützler, OleGut, UlrikeLi, ZeyuLeipzig UniversityScotland, UKPraatMicrosoft ExcelRRStudioR package 'brms'R package 'lattice'R package 'latticeExtra'SCHU 3250/1-1DataverseNOThe Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing)Schützler, OleSchützler, Ole2025-07-02Arts and HumanitiesStandard Scottish Englishacoustic phoneticssociophoneticsDispersion Theoryvowel variationcorpus dataThe study focuses on the vowel categories BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish English (SSE). The BOOT-vowel tends to be relatively front, the BIT-vowel tends to be lowered and/or centralised, and both are subject to sociolinguistic variation. In addition, this paper argues that they are also competing for limited articulatory (and acoustic) space, so that socially motivated variation may be constrained by the need for vowel categories to remain distinct. The acoustic study that is presented explores the sociolinguistic variation of the two vowels against the background of systemic, space-related constraints. The centre frequencies of the first two formants of all monophthong vowels are measured in n = 46 recordings from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. Measurements are normalised and the variation of BOOT and BIT is modelled statistically, using linear mixed-effects regression; additionally, the correlation of random intercepts for speakers are inspected. There are virtually no age and gender effects on the variation of the BOOT-vowel, while younger age and male gender correlate with more centralised variants of the BIT-vowel. These factors apart, there is evidence of a tendency for the two vowels to covary in a way that maintains their distance from each other in acoustic space.2012-01-012020-12-312024-07-012024-09-01United KingdomScotlandAnnotated acoustic measurementstrained linguist with a focus on phonology/phoneticsA phonological transcription automatically generated via forced alignment and manually corrected by the corpus compilers was customised by the data collector (e.g. ensuring that the focus was on stressed contexts, checking for remaining errors). Measuring intervals for relevant vowel categories were set manually. The extraction of formant readings was then done automatically.The data in this dataset were retrieved from the <a href="https://github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland" target="_blank">International Corpus of English: Scottish Component</a>, under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 DE license, and from the British National Corpus available at <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/" target="_blank">https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/</a>, licensed for academic and non-commercial purposes. The extracted text fragments that are contained in the data files SSE_vowels.csv, SSE_I.csv, SSE_U.csv of this dataset only represent non-substantial portions of the sources listed above, and they do not represent coherent larger texts. Therefore, the reuse (including redistribution) of these excerpts is permitted by the exceptions rules in IPR and database protection regulations, such as Fair use (USA cf. <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html" title="Fair use" target="_blank">US Copyright Act</a>), Fair dealing (UK; cf. <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright" title="Fair dealing" target="_blank">Exceptions to copyright</a>), the <a href="http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/1996/9/2019-06-06" title="Lawful users" target="_blank">EU Database Directive</a> (cf. article 8 Rights and obligations of lawful users), "lover, forskrifter, rettsavgjørelser og andre vedtak av offentlig myndighet" (Norway; cf. <a href="https://lovdata.no/lov/2018-06-15-40/§14" title="offentlige vedtak" target="_blank">§ 14 in Åndsverkloven</a>), "uvesentlige deler av databaser" (Norway; cf. <a href="https://lovdata.no/lov/2018-06-15-40/§24" title="uvesentlige deler av databaser" target="_blank">§ 24 in Åndsverkloven</a>), "sitatretten" (Norway; cf. <a href="https://lovdata.no/lov/2018-06-15-40/§29" title="sitatretter" target="_blank">§ 29 in Åndsverkloven</a>). As these excerpts do not represent substantial parts of the reused sources, the redistribution of these excerpts is according to Creative Commons (CC) also permitted if they are extracted from sources that are distributed under Creative Commons licenses (cf. question "Do I always have to comply with the license terms? If not, what are the exceptions?" in the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/faq/" title="CC FAQ" target="_blank">Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions</a>). Additionally, the use and redistribution of the frequency information obtained from the British National Corpus available at <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/" target="_blank">https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/</a>, is permitted by the exceptions rules in IPR and database protection regulations mentioned above.<ul> <li> <a href="https://www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en.html" target="_blank">ICE-website at the University of Zurich</a> </li> <li> Davies, Mark. 2004. British National Corpus (from Oxford University Press). Available online at <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/" target="_blank">https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/</a>. </li> <li> Kirk, John & Gerald Nelson. 2018. The International Corpus of English project: A progress report. World Englishes 34(4): 697–716. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12350" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12350</a> </li> <li> Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis & Bas Aarts. 2002. Exploring Natural Language. Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. </li> <li> Schützler, Ole, Ulrike Gut & Robert Fuchs. 2017. New perspectives on Scottish Standard English: Introducing the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. In Joan C. Beal & Sylvie Hancil (Hg.), Perspectives on northern Englishes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [TiEL 96]. 273–302. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110450903-012" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110450903-012</a> </li> <li> Access to corpus data: <a href="https://github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland" target="_blank">https://github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland</a> </li> </ul>The original sampling of texts for ICE-Scotland followed the general sampling scheme for corpora from that family and depended on the accessibility of institutions and the cooperation of individuals. It can therefore not be considered random.Measuring intervals were set manually, not automatically, taking into account spectrographic information. This way, many 'difficult' tokens could be salvaged.Tokens classified as unmeasurable (due to unclear or extremely unstable formant patterns or spurious formants) were excluded when setting the measuring intervals.With the exception of the tabular files SSE_vowels.csv, SSE_I.csv, SSE_U.csv, the dataset " Investigating the covariation of features in ‘crowded’ vowel spaces – A corpus-based study of /u/ and /ɪ/ in Standard Scottish English: Acoustic measurements " has been marked as dedicated to the public domain, as described here: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/">https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/</a>. The tabular files SSE_vowels.csv, SSE_I.csv, SSE_U.csv contain source information (i.e. the columns “text” and “textlength”), speaker information (i.e. the columns “gender” and “age”), and text fragments (i.e. the columns “lemma” and “word”) that have been extracted from the International Corpus of English: Scottish Component, available at <a href="https://github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland">github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland</a>, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 DE, under limitations and exceptions to IPR and database protection regulations. Additionally, these tabular files contain analyses (i.e. the columns “spoBNC_raw”, “spoBNC_pmw” and “spoBNC_log_pmw”) that have been based on the British National Corpus (BNC), available at <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/">english-corpora.org/bnc/</a>, licensed for academic and non-commercial purposes, is permitted under the <a href="https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/" target="_blank">US Fair Use Law</a>. The contribution of the author of the present dataset to these files, as detailed in the ReadMe file, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, as described here: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a>. Documentation of analysis: <a href="https://osf.io/fs3nk/" target="_blank">https://osf.io/fs3nk/</a>Schützler, Ole. 2026. "Investigating the covariation of features in ‘crowded’ vowel spaces: A corpus-based study of BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish English." In Philipp Meer & Ulrike Gut (eds.), English Corpus Phonetics and Phonology: Current Approaches and Future Directions (Topics in English Linguistics 122), 95-127. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783112213254-004Schützler, Ole. 2026. "Investigating the covariation of features in ‘crowded’ vowel spaces: A corpus-based study of BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish English." In Philipp Meer & Ulrike Gut (eds.), English Corpus Phonetics and Phonology: Current Approaches and Future Directions (Topics in English Linguistics 122), 95-127. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.00_ReadMe_CovariationOfFeaturesInCrowdedVowelSpaces.txttext/plainLicence_ICE-SCO.pdfapplication/pdfSSE_I.csvtext/comma-separated-valuesSSE_U.csvtext/comma-separated-valuesSSE_vowels.csvtext/comma-separated-values