  We have investigated the properties of a volume and magnitude limited sample
of nearby early type galaxies that were carefully selected from the AAO two
degree field galaxy redshift survey. We used images from the DSS to confirm the
E/S0 morphologies, and augmented this sample with field galaxies from Colbert
et al. 2001. We present spectroscopic observations of 22 galaxies from the
combined sample, from which central velocity dispersions and the Lick stellar
population indices were measured. After carefully correcting the spectra for
nebular emission we derived luminosity-weighted ages, metallicities, and
alpha-element abundance ratios. We compare these isolated galaxies with samples
of early-type galaxies in the Virgo and Coma clusters, and also with the sample
of galaxies in low-density regions of Kuntschner et al. (2002). We find that
galaxies in low-density environments are younger and have a greater spread of
ages compared to cluster galaxies. They also show a wider range of
metallicities at a given velocity dispersion than cluster galaxies, which
display only super-solar metallicities. On average cluster, as well as,
isolated galaxies show non-solar abundance ratios in alpha-elements, suggesting
that, independent of galactic environment, star formation occurred on short
time-scales. We reason that early-type galaxies in low-density environments
experienced merging-induced star-formation episodes over a longer and more
recent period of time compared to a cluster environment, and speculate that a
considerable fraction of their stars formed out of low-metallicity halo gaseous
material during the slow growth of a stellar disk between merging events.
