Designed to acquaint the reader with the field of phonology -- the study of the systems of linguistically significant sounds -- this book begins with a brief introduction to linguistics and a discussion of phonology's place within that field. It then goes on to cover a variety of topics including the nature of phonological units, phonological rules, which types of phenomena interest phonologists, and the evolution of phonological theory.
Suitable for many applications, this volume assumes no previous knowledge of linguistics. An excellent text for use in first or second year phonology courses, it will also be of value to those involved in cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and computer science.

This volume presents novel analyses of morphosyntax and phonology by well-known scholars in their respective fields. The book offers chapters on a range of Romance languages and dialects, including Canadian French, Standard French, Modern French, Sardinian, Sicilian, and Spanish. Other chapters focus on diachronic topics on French and Italian. The volume will be of interest to researchers looking for current research in linguistics on the Romance languages. It will also serve as a reference volume or supplemental reading for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in linguistics.

This volume takes a variety of approaches to the question 'what is a word?', with particular emphasis on where in the grammar wordhood is determined. Chapters in the book all start from the assumption that structures at, above, and below the 'word' are built in the same derivational system: there is no lexicalist grammatical subsystem dedicated to word-building. This type of framework foregrounds the difficulty in defining wordhood. Questions such as whether there are restrictions on the size of structures that distinguish words from phrases, or whether there are combinatory operations that are specific to one or the other, are central to the debate. In this respect, chapters in the volume do not all agree. Some propose wordhood to be limited to entities defined by syntactic heads, while others propose that phrasal structure can be found within words. Some propose that head-movement and adjunction (and Morphological Merger, as its mirror image) are the manner in which words are built, while others propose that phrasal movements are crucial to determining the order of morphemes word-internally. All chapters point to the conclusion that the phonological domains that we call words are read off of the morphosyntactic structure in particular ways. It is the study of this interface, between the syntactic and phonological modules of Universal Grammar, that underpins the discussion in this volume.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is the first volume specifically devoted to the phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants, a feature of many of the world's languages including Arabic, Bengali, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Persian, Saami, Swiss German, and Turkish. While the contrast between geminate and singleton consonants has been widely studied, the phonetic manifestation and phonological nature of geminate consonants, as well as their cross-linguistic similarities and differences, are not fully understood. The volume brings together original data and novel analyses of geminate consonants in a variety of languages across the world. Experts in the field present a wide range of approaches to the study of phonological contrasts in general by introducing various experimental and non-experimental methodologies; they also discuss phonological contrasts in a wider context and examine the behaviour of geminate consonants in loanword phonology and language acquisition. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on experimental phonetics, theoretical phonology, speech processing, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition.

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Buring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research. This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This book outlines a system of phonological features that is minimally sufficient to distinguish all consonants and vowels in the languages of the world. The extensive evidence is drawn from datasets with a combined total of about 1000 sound inventories. The interpretation of phonetic transcriptions from different languages is a long-standing problem. In this book, San Duanmu proposes a solution that relies on the notion of contrast: X and Y are different sounds if and only if they contrast in some language. He focuses on a simple procedure to interpret empirical data: for each phonetic dimension, all inventories are searched in order to determine the maximal number of contrasts required. In addition, every unusual feature or extra degree of contrast is re-examined to confirm its validity. The resulting feature system is surprisingly simple: fewer features are needed than previously proposed, and for each feature, a two-way contrast is sufficient. Nevertheless, the proposal is reliable in that the notion of contrast is uncontroversial, the procedure is explicit, and the result is repeatable. The book also offers discussion of non-contrastive differences between languages, sound classes, and complex sounds such as affricates, consonant-glide units, consonant-liquid units, contour tones, pre-nasalized stops, clicks, ejectives, and implosives.

This volume contains detailed surveys of the intonational phonology of fourteen typologically diverse languages, described in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Unlike the first volume, half of the languages are understudied languages and/or researched through fieldwork, and all vary widely in their word prosody as well as their geographic distribution. Each chapter provides the prosodic structure and intonational categories of the language as well as a description of focus prosody. The book also includes a chapter on the methodology of studying intonation from data collection to analysis, as well as a chapter on prosidic typology which proposes a new way of characterizing the intonation of the world's languages. The sound files accompaning the descriptions are available on the book's companion website.

This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of intonation and prosodic structure. Taking a phonological perspective, it shows how morpho-syntactic constituents are mapped to prosodic constituents according to well-formedness conditions. Using a tone-sequence model of intonation, it explores individual tones and how they combine, and discusses how information structure affects intonation in several ways, showing tones and melodies to be 'meaningful' in that they add a pragmatic component to what is being said. The author also shows how, despite a superficial similarity, languages differ in how their tonal patterns arise from tone concatenation. Lexical tones, stress, phrase tones, and boundary tones are assigned differently in different languages, resulting in great variation in intonational grammar, both at the lexical and sentential level. The last chapter is dedicated to experimental studies of how we process prosody. The book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in linguistics, and particularly in phonological theory.

This long-needed sourcebook assesses the unique styles and themes of notable African-American orators from the mid-19th century to the present—of 43 representative public speakers, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson to Barbara Jordan and Thurgood Marshall. The critical analyses of the oratory of a broad segment of different types of public speakers demonstrate how they have stressed the historical search for freedom, upheld American ideals while condemning discriminatory practices against African-Americans, and have spoken in behalf of black pride. This biographical dictionary with its evaluative essays, sources for further reading, and speech chronologies is designed for broad interdisciplinary use by students, teachers, activists, and general readers in college, university, institutional, and public libraries.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

This book is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation that was submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. Although much of the analysis and argumentation of the dissertation has survived rewriting, the organization has been considerably changed. To Paul Kiparsky and Morris Halle, lowe a major debt. Not only has it been a great privilege to work on phonology with both of them, but it is hard to imagine what this piece of research would have looked like without them. (They, of course, may well imagine a number of appropriate ways in which the work could be different had I not been involved .... ) In addition, special thanks are due to Ken Hale, the third member of my thesis committee. Our discussions of a variety of topics (including tone) helped me to keep a broader outlook on language than might have otherwise been the result of concentrating on a thesis topic.

It has been traditional in phonetic research to characterize monophthongs using a set of static formant frequencies, i.e., formant frequencies taken from a single time-point in the vowel or averaged over the time-course of the vowel. However, over the last twenty years a growing body of research has demonstrated that, at least for a number of dialects of North American English, vowels which are traditionally described as monophthongs often have substantial spectral change. Vowel inherent spectral change has been observed in speakers productions, and has also been found to have a substantial effect on listeners perception. In terms of acoustics, the traditional categorical distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs can be replaced by a gradient description of dynamic spectral patterns. This book includes chapters addressing various aspects of vowel inherent spectral change (VISC), including theoretical and experimental studies of the perceptually relevant aspects of VISC, the relationship between articulation (vocal-tract trajectories) and VISC, historical changes related VISC, cross-dialect, cross-language, and cross-age-group comparisons of VISC, the effects of VISC on second-language speech learning, and the use of VISC in forensic voice comparison.

This 1998 book is a comprehensive study of the intonation of different languages of the world, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, most of whom are native speakers of the language in question and who live or work in that country. Surveying intonation of twenty languages, the volume describes how, paradoxically, every language possesses intonation, yet the specific features of a speaker's intonation system are also highly dependent on the language, the dialect, and even the style, the mood and the attitude of the speaker. The volume introduces a new system for the multi-lingual transcription of intonation patterns. The chapters are organised following the same general outline to highlight the differences between languages. The emphasis is on description and comparison, rather than on theory, making this an invaluable sourcebook for researchers in the field.

This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change. The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.

This Handbook is a comprehensive volume outlining the foremost issues regarding research and teaching of second language speaking, examining such diverse topics as cognitive processing, articulation, knowledge of pragmatics, instruction in sub-components of speaking (e.g., grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary) and the attrition of the first language. Outstanding academics have contributed chapters to provide an integrated and inclusive perspective on oral language skills. Specialized contexts for speaking are also explored (e.g., English as a Lingua Franca, workplace, and interpreting). The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Speaking will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and education.

Focusing on the phonologies of children with functional (non-organic) speech disorders, this volume reports the latest findings in optimality theory, phonological acquisition and disorders. The book is based on typological, cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental evidence from over 200 children. It stands out because of the unique test case that the population offers to optimality theory, particularly with respect to puzzles of opacity, lawful orders of acquisition, and language learnability. Beyond its theoretical significance, this research holds clinical relevance for the assessment and treatment of disordered populations, most notably the systematic prediction of learning outcomes. This volume bridges the gap between theory and application by showing how each informs the other. It is intended for linguists, psychologists, speech pathologists, second-language instructors and those interested in the latest developments in phonological theory and its applied extensions.

This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Swedish. After an introduction on the history of the language and its relation to other Scandinavian languages, the book is divided into parts dealing with segmental phonology, lower prosodic phonology, stress and tone, morphology-phonology interactions, higher prosodic phonology, and intonation. The book concludes with concise accounts of phonotactics and the relationship between phonology and orthography. Tomas Riad's approach is data-oriented and, insofar as possible, theory-neutral. As well as making an important contribution to its subject, his book provides new insights into how morphology largely determines the distribution of stress in a Germanic language, and how tonal accent may signal wellformedness in word formation.

Prosody is generally studied at a separate linguistic level from syntax and semantics. It analyses phonetic properties of utterances such as pitch and prominence, and orders them into phonological categories such as pitch accent, boundary tone, and metrical grid. The goal is to define distinctive formal differentiators of meanings in utterances. But what these meanings are is either excluded or a secondary concern. This book takes the opposite approach, asking what are the basic categories of meaning that speakers want to transmit to listeners? And what formal means do they use to achieve it? It places linguistic form in functions of speech communication, and takes into account all the formal exponents - sounds, words, syntax, prosodies - for specific functional coding. Basic communicative functions such as 'questioning' may be universally assumed, but their coding by linguistic bundles varies between languages. A comparison of function-form systems in English, German and Mandarin Chinese shows this formal diversity for universal functions.

Following up on the Guide to Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface Theories (2011), written from a theory-neutral point of view, this book lays out the author's approach to the representational side of the interface. The book is thus about how information is transmitted to phonology when an object is inserted into phonological representations (as opposed to the derivational means, i.e. phase theory today). The idea of Direct Interface is that diacritics such as hash-marks in SPE or prosodic constituency since the early 80s, which mediate between morpho-syntax and phonology, are illegal in a modular environment where computational systems can only process domain-specific vocabulary. Direct Interface instead holds that only truly phonological vocabulary can carry morpho-syntactic information. It is shown that of all representational objects only syllabic space qualifies. Couched in CVCV (or strict CV), i.e. Government Phonology, this insight is then applied in detailed case studies of Belarusian, Corsican, Greek and the exhaustive lexical inventory of sonorant-obstruent-initial words in 13 Slavic languages,. In this sense, the book is the 2nd volume of A Lateral Theory of Phonology (2004).

In the field of second language (L2) acquisition, the number of studies focusing on L2 pronunciation instruction and perceptual/production training has increased as new classroom methodologies have been proposed and new goals for L2 pronunciation have been set. This book brings together different approaches to L2 pronunciation research in the classroom or in the language laboratory. 13 chapters, written by well-known researchers focusing on a variety of first and target languages, are divided into four parts: Pronunciation development and intelligibility: implications for teaching and training studies; L2 pronunciation teaching; L2 pronunciation training: implications for the classroom; and Pronunciation in the laboratory: High Variability Phonetic Training. Intended for researchers in the fields of second language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, speech therapies, speech technology, as well as second language teaching, this book not only summarizes the current research questions on L2 pronunciation teaching and training, but also predicts future scenarios for both researchers and practitioners in the field.

This book documents an understudied phenomenon in Austronesian languages, namely the existence of recurrent submorphemic sound-meaning associations of the general form -CVC. It fills a critical gap in scholarship on these languages by bringing together a large body of data in one place, and by discussing some of the theoretical issues that arise in analyzing this data. Following an introduction which presents the topic, it includes a critical review of the relevant literature over the past century, and discussions of the following: 1. problems in finding the root (the "needle in the haystack" problem), 2. root ambiguity, 3. controls on chance as an interfering factor, 4. unrecognized morphology as a possible factor in duplicating evidence, 5. the shape/structure of the root, 6. referents of roots, 7. the origin of roots, 8. the problem of distinguishing false cognates produced by convergence in root-bearing morphemes from legitimate comparisons resulting from divergent descent, and 9. the problem of explaining how submorphemes are transmitted across generations of speakers independently of the morphemes that host them. The remainder of the book consists of a list of sources for the 197 languages from which data is drawn, followed by the roots with supporting evidence, a short appendix, and references.