Linguists researching the sounds of languages do not just study lists of sounds but seek to discover generalizations about sound patterns by grouping them into categories. They study the common properties of each category and identify what distinguishes one category from another. Vowel patterns, for instance, are analysed and compared across languages to identify phonological similarities and differences. This account of vowel patterns in language brings a wealth of cross-linguistic material to the study of vowel systems and offers theoretical insights. Informed by research in speech perception and production, it addresses the fundamental question of how the relative prominence of word position influences vowel processes and distributions. The book combines a cross-linguistic focus with detailed case studies. Descriptions and analyses are provided for vowel patterns in over 25 languages from around the world, with particular emphasis on minor Romance languages and on the diachronic development of the German umlaut.

Language is more than words: it includes the prosodic features and patterns that we use, subconsciously, to frame meanings and achieve our goals in our interaction with others. Here, Nigel G. Ward explains how we do this, going beyond intonation to show how pitch, timing, intensity and voicing properties combine to form meaningful temporal configurations: prosodic constructions. Bringing together new findings and hitherto-scattered observations from phonetic and pragmatic studies, this book describes over twenty common prosodic patterns in English conversation. Using examples from real conversations, it illustrates how prosodic constructions serve essential functions such as inviting, showing approval, taking turns, organizing ideas, reaching agreement, and evoking action. Prosody helps us establish rapport and nurture relationships, but subtle differences in prosody across languages and subcultures can be damagingly misunderstood. The findings presented here will enable both native speakers of English and learners to listen more sensitively and communicate more effectively.

Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy - that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical - extending the approach to new languages and new structures - and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.

Language, apart from its cultural and social dimension, has a scientific side that is connected not only to the study of 'grammar' in a more or less traditional sense, but also to disciplines like mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. This book explores developments in linguistic theory, looking in particular at the theory of generative grammar from the perspective of the natural sciences. It highlights the complex and dynamic nature of language, suggesting that a comprehensive and full understanding of such a species-specific property will only be achieved through interdisciplinary work.

A proper understanding of intelligibility is at the heart of effective pronunciation teaching, and with it, successful teaching of speaking and listening. Far from being an optional 'add-it-on-if-we-have-time' language feature, pronunciation is essential because of its tremendous impact on speech intelligibility. Pronunciation dramatically affects the ability of language learners to make themselves understood and to understand the speech of others. But not all elements of pronunciation are equally important. Some affect intelligibility a great deal, while others do not. With a strong emphasis on classroom practice and how pronunciation teaching can be more effectively approached in different teaching contexts, this book provides an important resource for pronunciation researchers, with a distinctly practical focus. It shows how intelligibility research informs pronunciation teaching within communicative classrooms, enabling language teachers to incorporate intelligibility findings into their teaching. Professionals interested in oral communication, pronunciation, and speech perception will find the book fascinating.

This book presents a systematic hypothesis testing approach to the assessment of speech processing skills in children, and is based on the popular courses run by the authors. The book aims to develop the knowledge and analytical skills of those who need to administer and evaluate assessment materials. Principles of psycholinguistic investigation are introduced through a series of activities relating to theoretical and practical issues. The book demonstrates through case studies how to profile and interpret a child's performance within a developmental psycholinguistic model. It will be of particular interest to practitioners, researchers and students in the following areas: speech and language therapy; education; clinical, educational and developmental psychology and child language and clinical linguistics.

Since the 1960s phonological theory has countenanced two levels of representation underlying and surface form linked by a multi-staged derivation. This model is now being challenged by approaches, such as Optimality Theory, which substitute surface constraints for rules and derivations. If accepted, this shift would amount to a major revolution in the field. In this volume, a team of leading specialists addresses the issue, specifically focusing on the comparison and evaluation of the two alternatives.

How well have classic ideas on whole-word phonology stood the test of time? Waterson claimed that each child has a system of their own; Ferguson and Farwell emphasized the relative accuracy of first words; Menn noted the occurrence of regression and the emergence of phonological systematicity. This volume brings together classic texts such as these with current data-rich studies of British and American English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, French, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. This combination of classic and contemporary work from the last thirty years presents the reader with cutting-edge perspectives on child language by linking historical approaches with current ideas such as exemplar theory and usage-based phonology, and contrasting state-of-the-art perspectives from developmental psychology and linguistics. This is a valuable resource for cognitive scientists, developmentalists, linguists, psychologists, speech scientists and therapists interested in understanding how children begin to use language without the benefit of language-specific innate knowledge.

Remembering the Sound of Words is a major new studyof four of modern literature's most important writers--and the first serious attempt to account for complex sound effects in prose Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between such sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts. He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, throught a theory of alternating-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn to the acoustic surface of the text. Through close analysis of Mallarm 'e's prose-poetry, Proust's musical syntax, Joyce's memory-rhymes (from the Portrait of the Artist through Ulysses to Finegan's Wake ), and Beckett's prose and drama, Piette demonstrates that sound effects act as intricate reminders of memory-traces in the text. Despite wide divergence in these four writers' representations of memory, the book shows that the use of this memory-rhyme technique is common to them all, and is emplyed in particular to express the textual migration of past key-words, self-centred comic tyranny, and the fitful unifaction of body and memory within the narrative voice. This book is intended for scholars and students of

Humans instinctively form words by weaving patterns of meaningless speech elements. Moreover, we do so in specific, regular ways. We contrast dogs and gods, favour blogs to lbogs. We begin forming sound-patterns at birth and, like songbirds, we do so spontaneously, even in the absence of an adult model. We even impose these phonological patterns on invented cultural technologies such as reading and writing. But why are humans compelled to generate phonological patterns? And why do different phonological systems - signed and spoken - share aspects of their design? Drawing on findings from a broad range of disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, neuroscience and comparative animal studies, Iris Berent explores these questions and proposes a new hypothesis about the architecture of the phonological mind.

This introduction to the sounds of Korean is designed for English-speaking students with no prior knowledge of the language and includes online sound files, which demonstrate the sounds and pronunciation described. It will be an invaluable resource for students of Korean wanting to understand the basis of the current state of Korean phonetics and phonology, as well as for those studying Korean linguistics. * Provides a complete and authoritative description and explanation of the current state of Korean phonetics and phonology * Gives clear comparisons with English and provides practical advice on pronunciation * Provides a wealth of authentic Korean examples * Each chapter contains exercises and Did you know? sections to help students put their knowledge into practice.

This path-breaking study of the standardisation of English goes well beyond the traditional prescriptivism versus descriptivism debate. It argues that the way norms are established and enforced is the result of a complex network of social factors and cannot be explained simply by appeals to power and hegemony. It brings together insights from leading researchers to re-centre the discussion on linguistic communities and language users. It examines the philosophy underlying the urge to standardise language, and takes a closer look at both well-known and lesser-known historical dictionaries, grammars and usage guides, demonstrating that they cannot be simply labelled as 'prescriptivist'. Drawing on rich empirical data and case studies, it shows how the norm continues to function in society, influencing and affecting language users even today.

At the heart of generative phonology lies the assumption that the sounds of every language have abstract underlying representations, which undergo various changes in order to generate the 'surface' representations; that is, the sounds we actually pronounce. The existence, status and form of underlying representations have been hotly debated in phonological research since the introduction of the phoneme in the nineteenth century. This book provides a comprehensive overview of theories of the mental representation of the sounds of language. How does the mind store and process phonological representations? Kramer surveys the development of the concept of underlying representation over the last 100 years or so within the field of generative phonology. He considers phonological patterns, psycholinguistic experiments, statistical generalisations over data corpora and phenomena such as hypercorrection. The book offers a new understanding of contrastive features and proposes a modification of the optimality-theoretic approach to the generation of underlying representations.

The function of language is to transmit information from speakers to listeners. This book investigates an aspect of linguistic sound patterning that has traditionally been assumed to interfere with this function - neutralization, a conditioned limitation on the distribution of a language's contrastive values. The book provides in-depth, nuanced and critical analyses of many theoretical approaches to neutralization in phonology and argues for a strictly functional characterization of the term: neutralizing alternations are only function-negative to the extent that they derive homophones, and most surprisingly, neutralization is often function-positive, by serving as an aid to parsing. Daniel Silverman encourages the reader to challenge received notions by carefully considering these functional consequences of neutralization. The book includes a glossary, discussion points and lists of further reading to help advanced phonology students consolidate the main ideas and findings on neutralization.

In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement. This book is the first introduction to clitics, providing a complete summary of their properties, their uses, the reasons why they are of interest to linguists and the various theoretical approaches that have been proposed for them. The book describes a whole host of clitic systems and presents data from over 100 languages.

Die vorliegende Einfuehrung besteht aus 16 Einheiten, die alle so konzipiert sind, dass sie auch unabhaengig voneinander gelesen werden koennen. Jedes Kapitel fuehrt in einen bestimmten Bereich der Linguistik ein: in Semantik, Sprachgeschichte, Spracherwerb, mentales Lexikon, Pragmatik, Dialektologie, Phonetik, usw. Als Ausgangspunkt und Kapitelueberschrift dienen dabei beispielsweise Fragen wie Koennen Woerter muede machen? (Semantik), Gibt es Sprachen ohne Grammatik? (Syntax), Was ist Deutsch eigentlich fuer eine Sprache? (Sprachgeschichte) oder Wo sind die Woerter im Kopf und wie greift man auf sie zu?, die zugleich das Konzept dieses Buches illustrieren: Die wichtigsten linguistischen Themenkomplexe und Grundlagen sollen nicht nur in leicht zugaenglicher und gut verstaendlicher Form vermittelt werden, sondern es soll auch Neugier auf die Fragen geweckt werden, um die es jeweils geht. Vorkenntnisse werden dabei bewusst nicht vorausgesetzt. Da eine Einfuehrung naturgemaess nur jeweils einen begrenzten Einblick in ein Themengebiet geben kann, werden am Ende jeder Einheit stets auch Literaturtipps zur weitergehenden und vertieften Beschaeftigung mit dem behandelten Thema gegeben.

Die Studie untersucht Infinitivkonstruktionen in Objektfunktion im Deutschen, Italienischen und Ungarischen aus einer sprachtypologisch-kontrastiven Perspektive. Die beiden Strukturtypen, die AcI-Konstruktionen und die Objektsinfinitive werden anhand einer Korpusanalyse beschrieben. Die Forschungsparameter umfassen ausgewahlte semantische, morphologische und syntaktische Eigenschaften der Konstruktionen. Dabei widmet sich die Autorin insbesondere Aspekten, die in der bisherigen Forschung wenig Aufmerksamkeit erfahren haben, wie z. B. dem Vergleich von Infinitivkonstruktionen mit Objekten anderer Form. Das Buch richtet sich an KollegInnen und Studierende aus den Bereichen der germanistischen, italienischen und ungarischen Sprachwissenschaft, der kontrastiven Linguistik und der Sprachtypologie.

This volume explores the nature of ellipsis, the core phenomenon that results in various types of omission in sentences. The chapters adopt the popular 'silent structure' accounts of ellipsis, and investigate the question of when linguistic material becomes silenced during the derivation and realization of syntactic structure. The book begins with a detailed introduction from the editors that outlines the current generative syntactic approaches to the derivational timing of ellipsis. In the chapters that follow, internationally-recognized experts in the field address key topics including structure building, the architecture of grammar, the interaction of distinct modules with syntax, the order of operations in the post-syntactic component, and constraints on binding relations. The authors also present novel arguments for and against the derivational approaches to ellipsis, the licensing of ellipsis, and phonological constraints on elliptical sentences. The findings, based on data from English and other languages such as Armenian, Italo-Romance, Ossetic, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish, facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction between syntax and the neighbouring modules in the formation of elliptical utterances.

This book provides state-of-the-art coverage of research in laboratory phonology, an interdisciplinary research perspective which brings a wide range of experimental and analytic tools to bear on the central questions of how knowledge of spoken language is structured, learned, and used. The book presents works illustrating how laboratory phonology is practiced and highlights promising areas of current research.
Contributions address how laboratory phonology approaches and methodologies have provided insight into human speech and sound structure. Part one introduces the history, nature, and aims of laboratory phonology. The remaining four parts cover central issues in research done within this perspective, as well as methodological resources used for investigating these issues. This Handbook, the first specifically dedicated to the laboratory phonology approach, builds on the foundation of knowledge amassed in linguistics, speech research and allied disciplines. With the varied interdisciplinary contributions collected, the handbook showcases work in this vibrant field.

'Contrast' - the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language - is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents a fascinating account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.

'Markedness' refers to the tendency of languages to show a preference for particular structures or sounds. This bias towards 'marked' elements is consistent within and across languages, and tells us a great deal about what languages can and cannot do. This pioneering study presents a groundbreaking theory of markedness in phonology. De Lacy argues that markedness is part of our linguistic competence, and is determined by three conflicting mechanisms in the brain: (a) pressure to preserve marked sounds ('preservation'), (b) pressure to turn marked sounds into unmarked sounds ('reduction'), and (c) a mechanism allowing the distinction between marked and unmarked sounds to be collapsed ('conflation'). He shows that due to these mechanisms, markedness occurs only when preservation is irrelevant. Drawing on examples of phenomena such as epenthesis, neutralisation, assimilation, vowel reduction and sonority-driven stress, Markedness offers an important insight into this essential concept in the understanding of human language.

Two appendixes from Nabokov's famous edition of Eugene Onegin: his study of versification in English and Russian poetry, and his "term paper" on Pushkin's Ethiopian ancestor. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This textbook is a basic introduction to phonetics as a subdiscipline of general linguistics. All areas of phonetics are presented in depth (phonation, articulation, acoustics, perception, etc.), along with a short history of the discipline. The main objective of this introduction is to present the phonetic phenomena observable in vocal communication and the processes associated with them in the physical world as use of our biological endowment for communicative purposes.