Phonology and Phonetics [PP] – serie

The Kalevala, or runic, songs is a tradition at least a few thousand years old. It was shared by Finns, Estonians and other speakers of smaller Baltic-Finnic languages inhabiting the eastern side of the Baltic Sea in North-Eastern Europe. This book offers a combined perspective of a musicologist and a linguist to the structure of the runic songs. Archival recordings of the songs originating mostly from the first half of the 20th century were used as source material for this study. The results reveal a complex interaction between three different processes participating in singing: speech prosody, metre, and musical rhythm.

This volume consists of nine articles dealing with topics in distinctive feature theory in various typologically diverse languages, including Acehnese, Afrikaans, Basque, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Navajo, Portuguese, Tahltan, Terena, Tswana, Tuvan, and Zoque. The subjects dealt with in the book include feature geometry, underspecification (in rule-based and in Opti-mality Theoretic treatments) and the phonetic implementation of phonological features. Other topics include laryngeal features (e.g. [voice], [spread glottis], [nasal]), and place features for consonants and vowels. The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on feature theory and/or the phonetics-phonology interface.

This collection of recent papers in Laboratory Phonology approaches phonological theory from several different empirical directions. Psycholinguistic research into the perception and production of speech has produced results that challenge current conceptions about phonological structure. Field work studies provide fresh insights into the structure of phonological features, and the phonology-phonetics interface is investigated in phonetic research involving both segments and prosody, while the role of underspecification is put to the test in automatic speech recognition.

This collection of recent papers in Laboratory Phonology approaches phonological theory from several different empirical directions. Psycholinguistic research into the perception and production of speech has produced results that challenge current conceptions about phonological structure. Field work studies provide fresh insights into the structure of phonological features, and the phonology-phonetics interface is investigated in phonetic research involving both segments and prosody, while the role of underspecification is put to the test in automatic speech recognition.

The book includes a selection of articles by Morris Halle dealing with issues in the theory and practice of phonetics and phonology. The articles, written in the course of the last forty years, concern matters that remain to this day at the cutting edge of the discipline.

This collection of papers from Eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology (held in New Haven, CT) explores what laboratory data that can tell us about the nature of speakers' phonological competence and how they acquire it, and outlines models of the human phonological capacity that can meet the challenge of formalizing that competence. The window on the phonological capacity is broadened by including, for the first time in the Laboratory Phonology series, work on signed languages and papers that explicitly compare signed and spoken phonologies.A major focus, cutting across signed and spoken phonologies, is that phonological competence must include both qualitative (or categorical) and quantitative (or variable) knowledge. Theoretical approaches represented in the collection for accommodating these types of knowledge include modularity, dynamical grammars, and probabilistic grammars. A second major focus is on the acquisition of this knowledge. Here the papers pursue the consequences for acquisition of taking into account the richness and variability of the adult systems that provide input to the child. The final focus is on how phonological knowledge guides speech production. Data and models address the question of how speech gestures interact with one another locally (through articulatory constraints and syllable-level organization) and how they interact with the prosodic structure of an utterance.The twenty-six papers in the collection include invited contributions from Diane Brentari, David Corina, David Perlmutter, D. Robert Ladd, Diamandis Gafos, Marilyn Vihman, Shelley Velleman, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, and Dani Byrd.

The comprehensive analysis of the segmental and metrical system of the Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian provides a significant contribution to both phonetic and phonological theory. Based on the author's original fieldwork and experimental investigations, it is the first in-depth study of this area, tracing it back also to its Old High German roots, particularly that of the dialect of Notker. Quantity alternations - notably word-initial long/short consonantal alternations - asymmetric neutralization of phonetic-phonological contrasts, stress and weight are most prominent among the theoretical issues on which Thurgovian phonology is brought to bear.

This edited volume investigates the role of phonetics and phonology in psycholinguistics. Speaking and understanding spoken language both engage phonological and phonetic knowledge. There are detailed models of phonological and phonetic encoding in language production and there are equally refined models of phonetic and phonological processing in language comprehension. However, since most psycholinguists work on either language production or comprehension, the relationship between the two has received surprisingly little attention. Prominent researchers in various areas of psycholinguistics were invited to discuss this relationship focusing on the phonological and phonetic components.

This volume contains a collection of papers that address issues in Spanish phonology from the perspective of laboratory phonology. While volumes on Spanish phonology have been published in the past, never has one of these volumes dedicated itself exclusively to experimental studies. This volume not only presents current experimental research on Spanish phonology, but also represents the variety of issues in Spanish phonology that can be addressed experimentally and the numerous types of experimentation that can be used to further our understanding of phonological issues. The issues addressed by the studies in this volume include stress placement, rhotics, lexical storage, acquisition of sociolinguistic variables, and epenthesis by Spanish speakers learning English as a second language. Experimental approaches include traditional production experiments, perception experiments, computational modelling, and variationist methods. This variety, both in terms of issues covered and experimental approaches, ensures that this unique volume is representative of the breadth of work that is being conducted on Spanish phonology from experimental perspectives.While this volume is aimed principally at linguists working on, or interested in, Spanish phonology, it will also be of use to a variety of readers. This volume will also be of interest to phonologists, phoneticians, cognitive scientists, and others who may be interested in the contributions that empirical research can make to the study of phonology. Professional linguists as well as graduate students will find this volume to be an important addition to their library.

Prosodies, in the broad Firthian sense, covers phenomena that extend over stretches of segmental and featural units that must be examined with respect to their interaction with other features to fully appreciate their role in the phonetics and phonology of a given language. The papers deal with a wide range of subjects, from intonational prominence and prosodic phrasing to the acoustic properties of segments and features. Prosodies significantly broadens our knowledge of languages and dialect varieties that as yet have not been carefully investigated such as Cairene and Lebanese Arabic, Catalan including Central Catalan and the insular dialects of Majorcan, Minorcan and Alguer Catalan, Galician, Italian, various dialects of Portuguese (Standard European, Northern European, and Brazilian Portuguese), and different varieties of Argentine Spanish as well as Peninsular Spanish. However, well-known West Germanic languages, English, Dutch and German, have not been neglected. Many of the contributions are the first account of the phenomena addressed in the language(s) under consideration thus bringing new data to light. Moreover, most papers take a cross-linguistic or cross-dialectal view favouring a better understanding of language similarities and differences, as well as of language variation and change. This approach is crucial in the case of neighbouring languages/varieties and is an important contribution to the development of language typologies. And as is characteristic of the series, the research presented in Prosodies cover laboratory approaches as well as theoretical investigations.

This thorough study of the expression of contrast in the world's vowel systems examines phonetic and phonological differences between so-called strong and weak positions, bringing the full range of data from positional neutralization systems to bear on central questions at the interface between phonetics and phonology. The author draws evidence from a diverse array of sources, bringing together cross-linguistic typological surveys, detailed investigations of the diachrony of specific languages (Slavic, Turkic, Uralic, Austronesian, among many others) and original studies in experimental phonetics. Devoted at once to empirical coverage and to theoretical investigation, this is the first work to compile so exhaustive a study of positional neutralization patterns in the languages of the world. On the basis of this catalog of evidence, the author argues for a diachronically oriented approach to the phonetic motivations behind phonological patterns, with phonologization as its central mechanism.Three pairs of traditionally-identified strong and weak positions for the realization of vowel contrasts are selected and examined in detail: stressed and unstressed syllables, domain final and non-final syllables, and domain initial and non-initial syllables. Neutralization patterns in each position are extracted from survey data, and analyzed in light of the phonetic characteristics of each pair of positions. Both the nature of the patterns identified as well as the variety and sources of exceptions have important consequences for formal phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics as well.

This book will create greater public awareness of some recent exciting findings in the formal study of poetry. The last influential volume on the subject, Rhythm and Meter , edited by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, appeared fifteen years ago. Since that time, a number of important theoretical developments have taken place, which have led to new approaches to the analysis of meter. This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. In terms of empirical coverage, the papers focus on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. Thus, the collection is truly international in its scope. The volume also contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory (Kiparsky, Hammond), other constraint-based approaches (Friedberg, Hall, Scherr), the Quantitative approach to verse (Tarlinskaja, Friedberg, Hall, Scherr, Youmans) associated with the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach (Cole and Miyashita, Fitzgerald), a semantic-pragmatic approach (Fabb), and an alternative generative approach developed in Estonia (M. Lotman and M. K. Lotman). The book will be of interest to both linguists interested in stress and speech rhythm, constraint systems, phrasing, and phonology-syntax interaction and poetry, as well as to students of poetry interested in the connection between language and literature.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the 9th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, which was held in June 2004 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The theme of the conference was Change in Phonology, broadly conceived as to include both language evolution at the level of the speech community and development within the individual speaker/hearer. The chapters in this book are organized in five sections: phonological variation and change within the speech community, mechanisms of change in sound systems, phonological acquisition from different experimental perspectives, second language phonology, modeling of language variation, and segmental and suprasegmental phenomena related to the timing of speech gestures. These topics are explored from a number of perspectives, both within and outside of traditional linguistics. We believe that the papers included in this volume demonstrate that the Laboratory Phonology approach has reached maturity and has succeeded in its aim not only to bridge the gap between phonetics and phonology but also to establish a fruitful and mutually beneficial dialog between linguists and other scientists and scholars concerned with the study of the sound patterns of human language from different perspectives.

Despite the recent advances in the integration of lexical tone and intonation in phonological theory, all too often the study of intonation and the study of lexical tone are viewed as belonging to different research traditions. This collection strengthens the integrated approach by studying tone and intonation within a common framework, and by tracing their interaction in specific prosodic systems. Some papers deal with the structural properties of lexical tone and intonation, while others focus on the historical development of prosodic systems. The volume also includes a re-evaluation of a classic paper on the typology of tone rules, and a survey of features signalling question intonation in African languages.

This volume presents 14 experimental studies of lexical tone and intonation in a wide variety of languages. Six papers deal with the discriminability or the function of intonation contours and lexical tones in specific languages, as established on the basis of listener responses, as well as with brain activation patterns resulting from the perception of tonal and intonational stimuli. The remaining eight papers report on detailed phonetic findings on a variety of tonal phenomena in a number of languages, including declination in tone languages, final lowering, consonant-tone interactions and pitch target alignment.

This book takes contrast, an issue that has been central to phonological theory since Saussure, as its central theme, making explicit its importance to phonological theory, perception, and acquisition. The volume brings together a number of different contemporary approaches to the theory of contrast, including chapters set within more abstract representation-based theories, as well as chapters that focus on functional phonetic theories and perceptual constraints. This book will be of interest to phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, researchers in first and second language acquisition, and cognitive scientists interested in current thinking on this exciting topic.

The book consists of nine chapters dealing with the interaction of speech perception and phonology. Rather than accepting the common assumption that perceptual considerations influence phonological behaviour, the book aims to investigate the reverse direction of causation, namely the extent to which phonological knowledge guides the speech perception process.Most of the chapters discuss formalizations of the speech perception process that involve ranked phonological constraints. Theoretical frameworks argued for are Natural Phonology, Optimality Theory, and the Neigbourhood Activation Model. The book discusses the perception of segments, stress, and intonation in the fields of loanword adaptation, second language acquisition, and sound change.The book is of interest to phonologists, phoneticians and psycholinguists working on the phonetics-phonology interface, and to everybody who is interested in the idea that phonology is not production alone.

This book provides an overview of current issues in variation and gradience in phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics. It contributes to the growing interest in gradience and variation in theoretical phonology by combing research on the factors underlying variability and systematic quantitative results with theoretical phonological considerations. Variation is inherent to language, and one of the aims of phonological theory is to describe and explain the mechanisms underlying variation at every level of phonological representation. Variation below the segment concerns articulatory, acoustic and perceptual cues that contribute to the formation of natural classes of sounds. At the segmental level there are grammatical differences in the production and perception of contextual variation of segments and in the syntagmatic constraints on the combination of segments. At the suprasegmental level the mapping of tones to grammatical functions and vice versa is discussed. Further aspects addressed in this book are factors outside of language: Variation that arises as a result of a particular dialect or of belonging to a certain age group, or variation that is the consequence of language change.Gradience and variation have always been a central issue in phonetic and sociolinguistic research. Gradience introduces variation in phonology as well. If a phonetic entity can be pronounced in different ways, depending on the environment, prosodic factors or dialectal influences, this ‘gradience’ may introduce ‘variation’, which we understand as a stable state of grammar.

Complexity approaches, developed in physics and biology for almost two decades, show today a huge potential for investigating challenging issues in Humanities and Cognitive Sciences and obviously in the study of language(s). Theoretical approaches that integrate self-organization, emergence, non linearity, adaptive systems, information theory, etc., have already been developed to provide a unifying framework that sheds new light on the duality between linguistic diversity on the one hand and unique cognitive capacity of language processing on the other hand. Nevertheless, most of the linguistics literature written in this framework focuses on the syntactic level addressed through computational complexity or performance optimization, while other linguistic components have been somewhat neglected.In this context, the proposed volume draws on an interdisciplinary sketch of the phonetics-phonology interface in the light of complexity. Composed of several first-order contributions, it will consequently be a significant landmark at the time of the rise of several projects linking complexity and linguistics around the world.

The present volume contains a selection of the papers and commentaries which were originally presented at the Tenth Conference of Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon10) held in Paris from June 29 to July 1, 2006. The theme of the volume is Variation, Phonetic Detail and Phonological Representation. It brings together specialists of different fields of speech research with the goal to discuss the relevance of patterns of variation and phonetic details on phonological representations and theories. The topic is addressed from the angles of speech production, perception, acquisition, speech disorders, and language universals. The contributions are grouped thematically in five sections, each of which is commented by invited discussants. Section I contains the contributions to the special '10th anniversary session' of the conference which represent in a prototypical way some of the different research questions that have been at the core of important debates over the last 20 years in the laboratory phonology community. Issues of phonological universals and language typology are addressed in section II. In section III, the notions of variation and phonetic detail are examined with regard to how they are acquired and dealt with in the formation of phonological representation in emerging systems. Section IV focuses on recent work at the crossroad between normal and disordered speech.

This book includes the work of experts from a wide range of backgrounds who share the desire to understand how the human brain represents words. The focus of the volume is on the nature and structure of word forms and morphemes, the processes operating on the speech input to gain access to lexical representations, the modeling and acquisition of these processes, and on the neural underpinnings of lexical representation and process.

Sonority has a long and contentious history. It has often been invoked by linguists as an explanatory principle underlying various cross-linguistic phonotactic generalizations, especially within the domain of the syllable. However, many phonologists and phoneticians have expressed concerns about the adequacy of formal accounts based on sonority, including even doubts about the very existence of sonority itself.To date, the topic of sonority has never been the focus of an entire book. Consequently, this is the first complete volume that explores diverging viewpoints about phonological phenomena rooted in sonority taken from numerous languages. All of the contributors are well-known and respected linguists who publish their research in leading academic outlets. Furthermore, each chapter in this collection contains new, cutting-edge results based on the latest trends in the field. Hence, no other extant piece of literature matches this volume in terms of its breadth and coverage of issues, all converging on the common theme of sonority.Given the wide variety of subtopics in this collection, there is something to appeal to everyone — the list of contributions encompasses areas such as Optimality Theory, acquisition, computational modeling, acoustic phonetics, typology, syllable structure, speech perception, markedness, connectionism, psycholinguistics, and even MRI technology. What ties all of these issues together is a solid and consistent emphasis on sonority as a unified background phenomenon. Furthermore, a continuum of opinions about sonority is represented, ranging from complete acceptance and enthusiasm, on the one hand, to moderate skepticism on the other hand.

This book proposes that phonological contrast, in particular the robustness of a phonemic contrast, does not depend solely on the presence of minimal pairs, but is instead affected by a set of phonetic, usage-based, and systemic factors. This perspective opens phonology to a more direct interpretation through phonetic analysis, undertaken in a series of case studies on the Romanian vowel system. Both the synchronic phonetics and morpho-phonological alternations are studied, to understand the forces that have historically shaped and now maintain the phonemic system of Romanian. A corpus study of phoneme type frequency in Romanian reveals marginal contrasts among vowels, in which a sharp distinction between allophones and phonemes fails to capture relationships among sounds. An investigation of Romanian /Ɨ/ provides insight into the historical roots of marginal contrast, and a large acoustic study of Romanian vowels and diphthongs is a backdrop for evaluating the phonetic and perceptual realization of marginal contrast. The results provide impetus for a model in which phonology, phonetics, morphology and perception interact in a multidimensional way.

This volume presents current work on a topic in Romance linguistics that still informs linguistic theory to this day: metaphony in the languages of Italy. Papers discuss fundamental research topics such as phonological opacity in the light of chain shifts, post-tonic harmony and consonant transparency, the role of morphosyntax in the typology of metaphony, the explanatory adequacy of feature-based versus element-based analyses, and the locus of metaphony in grammar. Other chapters present new experimental data, thus building a more accurate empirical foundation for the study of metaphony. We envision the volume to become a reference book not only for an updated descriptive survey of metaphonic patterns in Italy but also a thorough discussion of the challenges that metaphony poses for different (morpho)phonological theories. The book bridges the gap between descriptive works and theoretical thinking in the study of metaphony.

This book intends to place Nick Clements’ contribution to Feature Theory in a historical and contemporary context and to introduce some of his unpublished manuscripts as well as new work with colleagues collected in this book.

In this book, some of today’s leading neurolinguists and psycholinguists provide insight into the nature of phonological processing using behavioural measures, computational modeling, EEG and fMRI. The essays cover a range of topics including categorization, acoustic variability and invariance, underspecification, talker-specificity and machine learning, focusing on the acoustics, perception, acquisition and neural representation of speech.

Despite earlier work by Trubetzkoy, Jakobson and Greenberg, phonological typology is often underrepresented in typology textbooks. At the same time, most phonologists do not see a difference between phonological typology and cross-linguistic (formal) phonology. The purpose of this book is to bring together leading scholars to address the issue of phonological typology, both in terms of the unity and the diversity of phonological systems.

This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world’s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.

Phonetically reduced forms are plentiful, theoretically interesting, and a key challenge for automatic speech recognition systems. Yet canonical forms are still central to models of production and perception. Drawing from different fields and diverse languages, this volume brings new insights to the debate on abstractions and canonical forms in linguistics: their psychological reality, descriptive adequacy, and technical implementability.