Two questions dominate this ethnographic, literary, and historical study of Somali society through its orature. First, in what ways do Somali oral texts provide information about women and gender relations in Somali society? Second, how do these oral texts present the concepts of "tradition" and an authentic cultural heritage and identity, particularly as these concepts affect women and gender relations? In seeking to answer these questions, Kapteijns has gathered a considerable number of Somali oral texts and popular songs. The first part of the book focuses on the texts from the colonial period and develops a critical ethnography of women and gender relations while the second part considers contemporary love songs as important cultural sites for debate about women and "tradition." Kapteijns' book will enlighten readers unfamiliar with the wit and spirit of Somali culture. Somali readers will find the book essential for critically engaging the received notions of their past and tradit Kapteijns' book will enlighten readers unfamiliar with the wit and spirit of Somali culture. Somali readers will find the book essential for critically engaging the received notions of their past and traditions.

This volume explores how linguistic research can support the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language. It responds to a rapidly growing interest in the Chinese language all over the world, and answers the need for a strong research background for the discipline. Without that, Chinese language learning remains only a unique experience and/or a useful education challenge. The first section explores crucial issues about the structure and use of Chinese as a Second Language such as word-order, noun-noun compounds, meaning-making in writing, pronunciation and stress and tone. The second section explores the learning of Chinese by seeking answer to questions about difficulties, expectations, beliefs, use of corpus and learning how to express necessity. The authors coming from eight different countries demonstrate how existing knowledge has been generated, bring together different lines of research, point out tendencies in the field, demonstrate and explain what tools and methods researchers can use to address major issues in the field, and give direction to what future research should focus on.

The area of research on printed word recognition has been one of the most active in the field of experimental psychology for well over a decade. However, notwithstanding the energetic research effort and despite the fact that there are many points of consensus, major controversies still exist.

This volume is particularly concerned with the putative relationship between language and reading. It explores the ways by which orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning are interrelated in the reading process. Included are theoretical discussions as well as reviews of experimental evidence by leading researchers in the area of experimental reading studies. The book takes as its primary issue the question of the degree to which basic processes in reading reflect the structural characteristics of language such as phonology and morphology. It discusses how those characteristics can shape a language's orthography and affect the process of reading from word recognition to comprehension.

Contributed by specialists, the broad-ranging mix of articles and papers not only gives a picture of current theory and data but a view of the directions in which this research area is vigorously moving.

To apply the same approaches to analysing spoken and written formulaic language is problematic; to do so masks the fact that the contextual meaning of spoken formulaic language is encoded, to a large extent, in its prosody. In The Prosody of Formulaic Sequences, Phoebe Lin offers a new perspective on formulaic language, arguing that while past research often treats formulaic language as a lexical phenomenon, the phonological aspect of it is a more fundamental facet. This book draws its conclusions from three original, empirical studies of spoken formulaic language, assessing intonation unit boundaries as well as features such as tempo and stress placement. Across all studies, Lin considers questions of methodology and conceptual framework. The corpus-based descriptions of prosody outlined in this book not only deepen our understanding of the nature of formulaic language but have important implications for English Language Teaching and automatic speech synthesis.

The History of English Spelling reveals the history of Modern English spelling, tracing its origins and development from Old English up to the present day. * Includes a wealth of information and data on English spelling not available anywhere else * Features a complementary website with additional material at www.historyofenglishspelling.info * Includes detailed coverage of the contributions from French, Latin, Greek - and the many other languages - to our current orthography * Serves as a companion volume to Geoffrey Hughes's A History of English Words in the same series

The last 50 years have witnessed a rapid growth in the understanding of the articulation and the acoustics of vowels. Contemporary theories of speech perception have concentrated on consonant perception, and this volume is intended as a balance to such bias. The authors propose a computational theory of auditory vowel perception, accounting for vowel identification in the face of acoustic differences between speakers and speaking rate and stress. This work lays the foundation for future experimental and computational studies of vowel perception.

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 book presents an empirical study of syllable structure and phonotactic restructuring in six Caribbean creoles with Dutch, English and French as main lexifier languages. It is shown that, although some structures are more commonly permitted than others, there is considerable cross-creole variation, especially with respect to word-final structures. The findings provide support for recent SLA approaches to the emergence of creole phonology.

This is the first comprehensive work on word and sentence prosody in Koshikijima Japanese, a dialect of Japanese not fully documented in the literature. It is an endangered dialect spoken by about 2,000 speakers on a small southern island in Japan. Being separated from mainland dialects by the sea, this dialect exhibits unique prosodic features not shared by other Japanese dialects. It also exhibits considerable regional variations among the ten or more small villages that were isolated from each other until recently. Based on the author's fieldwork, the book analyzes word accent and intonation, the two linguistic areas in which this endangered dialect exhibits unique features and remarkable regional variations within itself. They include the emergence and development of a secondary H tone, postlexical deletion of the primary H tone, and the L boundary tone in question and vocative intonation. These phenomena bear crucially on general issues in prosody, including postlexical tonal neutralizations, competitions between lexical and postlexical tones, and the number of tones that a syllable can maximally bear. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of studying an endangered language/dialect in general linguistic contexts.

This handbook provides easy access to current practice and requirements in the main spoken language technologies.

This book explores the interaction of grammatical components in a wide variety of languages, and presents and exemplifies new experimental and analytic techniques for studying linguistic interfaces. Speaking a language requires access to the different aspects of its grammar -- semantic, syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, morphological, and phonetic. Knowing how these interact is crucial to understanding the operations of any specific language and to the explanation of how language in general operates in the mind. The new research presented here combines theoretical and experimental perspectives on one of the most productive fields in contemporary linguistics.
After the editors' introduction the volume is organized along four themes: the structural properties of sentences interfacing with meaning and the lexicon; internal word structure and its effect on the syntactic and phonological components; the syntax-phonology interface and its relation to the phonetics-phonology interface; and the implications of interfaces for language acquisition and language processing. The book will interest theoretical linguists and all those in linguistics and cognitive science working on the mental operations of language.

This book proposes a new representational analysis of reduplication based on making explicit precedence relations in phonological representations.The main claim is that reduplication results from loops in the precedence structure of phonological representations. Modular rule based analyses of overapplication and underapplication effects including backcopying are presented to argue against the McCarthy and Prince (1995) claim that a derivational model of reduplication is conceptually and empirically inadequate. Other sections of the book discuss the implications of explicit precedence information for the concatenation of morphemes, the analysis of infixation, and templates in reduplication. Analyses of relevant phenomena from Indonesian, Tohono Oodham, Chaha, Chumash and Nancowry among other languages are provided.

The linguistic analysis of runic inscriptions on the Continent tends to focus on individual texts or on groups of texts seen as parallel. We can advance our understanding of the state of Continental Germanic dialects in the 5th-7th centuries by examining the evidence for the major sound changes in a larger dataset. The study begins with a brief discussion of the Proto-Germanic phonemic system and the major processes by which the systems of Old High German (OHG) and Old Saxon (OS) develop from it. The main body of the work consists of the analysis of a corpus of 90 inscriptions (including, but not confined to, those conventionally labeled "South Germanic") for evidence of these changes. Rather than making the individual inscription the focus for analysis, the investigation groups together all possible witnesses to a particular phonological process. In many respects, the data are found to be consistent with the anticipated developments of OHG and OS; but we encounter some problems which the existing models of the sound changes cannot account for. There is also some evidence for processes at work in the dialects of the inscriptions which are not attested in OHG or OS.

This book puts together recent theoretical developments in prosodic phonology by leading specialists and presents language particular investigations on the morphosyntax-phonology interface by expert linguists working on diverse languages such as German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish.

This book analyses and challenges the metatheoretical framework which supports information-processing models of human speech perception. The first part consists of a review of speech perception research in the information-processing paradigm; an overview of the cognitivist philosophy from which this approach takes its justification; and an introduction to some relevant themes of phenomenological philosophy. The second half uses the phenomenological insights discussed to demonstrate some inadequacies of cognitivism; to show how these inadequacies underlie problems with the information-processing theory; and suggests an alternative framework with significant change of focus.

This is the essential one-volume resource for advanced students and academics in phonology. "The Continuum Companion to Phonology" offers the definitive guide to a key area of linguistic study. It covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. It offers a survey of current research and also gives more practical guidance on advanced study and research in the area. The book includes coverage of key terms, and sections on laboratory and field phonology as well as phonological interfaces with other fields. It moves from coverage of the smallest units such as features and moras to larger units such as phrases and utterances. It is a complete resource for postgraduate students and researchers working in phonology. "The Continuum Companions Series" is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.

Tonal accents in Norwegian: Phonology, morphology and lexical specification breaks from the traditional and contemporary analyses of word accent in North Germanic with the goal of providing a more simplex and unified morphophonological analysis of word accents in North Germanic. It gives the facts of accent distribution in Standard East Norwegian, discusses how three of the more recent and most important analyses of accent assignment in Norwegian and Swedish deal with these facts and provides an alternative analysis. Given that many Accent 1 words are loans, the book also discusses how loanword incorporated in East Norwegian and other North Germanic dialects and the question of why loans predominantly bear Accent 1. Although the focus of the book is word accent assignment in Standard East Norwegian, it also refers to Central Swedish and Old Norse. In this way, it accounts for many aspects of accent assignment, the true nature of which might have gone undetected had only one of the North Germanic language been taken into consideration. The book also dedicates one chapter to the phonetics of the tonal contrast. Addressing the question of how perceptually salient the tonal contrast is.

Ranging from tonogenesis, stress shift, and quantity readjustment to paradigmatic levelling, allomorphy, and grammaticalization, this collection covers a wide spectrum of developments, primarily in Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Aryan. A traditional umbrella category of change in systems is that of analogy. Somewhat less sanctioned, markedness is a basic relation shaping the structure of systems, in phonology as well as morphology.

Articulatory Phonetics presents a concise and non-technical introduction to the physiological processes involved in producing sounds in human speech. * Traces the path of the speech production system through to the point where simple vocal sounds are produced, covering the nervous system, and muscles, respiration, and phonation * Introduces more complex anatomical concepts of articulatory phonetics and particular sounds of human speech, including brain anatomy and coarticulation * Explores the most current methodologies, measurement tools, and theories in the field * Features chapter-by-chapter exercises and a series of original illustrations which take the mystery out of the anatomy, physiology, and measurement techniques relevant to speech research * Includes a companion website at www.wiley.com/go/articulatoryphonetics with additional exercises for each chapter and new, easy-to-understand images of the vocal tract and of measurement tools/data for articulatory phonetics teaching and research * Password protected instructor s material includes an answer key for the additional exercises

There is still widespread disagreement among historical linguists about how, or whether, syntactic reconstruction can be done. This book presents a comprehensive methodology for syntactic reconstruction, grounded in a constructional understanding of language. The author then uses that methodology to reconstruct Proto-Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages in Papua New Guinea. Chapters are devoted to phonology, lexicon, verbal morphosyntax, nominal morphosyntax, and syntactic constructions. The work culminates in a sketch of Proto-Sogeram grammar. Based largely on the author's original fieldwork, this is an innovative application of a novel methodology to new data, and the most complete reconstruction of a Papuan proto-language to date. It will be of interest to scholars of language change, language reconstruction, typology, and Papuan languages.

The Navajo language is spoken by the Navajo people who live in the Navajo Nation, located in Arizona and New Mexico in the southwestern United States. The Navajo language belongs to the Southern, or Apachean, branch of the Athabaskan language family. Athabaskan languages are closely related by their shared morphological structure; these languages have a productive and extensive inflectional morphology. The Northern Athabaskan languages are primarily spoken by people indigenous to the sub-artic stretches of North America. Related Apachean languages are the Athabaskan languages of the Southwest: Chiricahua, Jicarilla, White Mountain and Mescalero Apache. While many other languages, like English, have benefited from decades of research on their sound and speech systems, instrumental analyses of indigenous languages are relatively rare. There is a great deal ofwork to do before a chapter on the acoustics of Navajo comparable to the standard acoustic description of English can be produced. The kind of detailed phonetic description required, for instance, to synthesize natural sounding speech, or to provide a background for clinical studies in a language is well beyond the scope of a single study, but it is necessary to begin this greater work with a fundamental description of the sounds and supra-segmental structure of the language. Inkeeping with this, the goal of this project is to provide a baseline description of the phonetic structure of Navajo, as it is spoken on the Navajo reservation today, to provide a foundation for further work on the language.