This book presents for the first time an in-depth historical account of vowel prosthesis in the Romance languages. Vowel prosthesis is a change which involves the appearance of a non-etymological vowel at the beginning of a word: a familiar example is the initial e which appears in the development of Latin sperare to Spanish esperar and French esperer (to hope). Despite its widespread incidence in the Romance languages, it has remained poorly studied. In his wide-ranging comparative coverage, Professor Sampson identifies three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have occurred and explores in detail their historical trajectory and the relationship between them. The presentation draws freely throughout on the rich philological materials available from Romance and brings to light various unexpected changes in the productive use of prosthesis through time. For example in French and Italian (which is Tuscan-based), one category of prosthesis became well established in the early Middle Ages only to lose productivity and subsequently become moribund. With its extensive use of empirical data and findings from theoretical linguistics, the book offers a thorough and revealing account of a fascinating chapter in the phonological history of Romance."

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 collection of papers by an international group of authors honors Jonathan Kaye's contributions to phonology by expanding some of Kaye's ideas to a variety of theoretical topics and languages. The set of ideas discussed or used in this collection includes: empty categories, licensing relationships and constraints, a restrictive two-levelled approach to phonology (without rule ordering or constraint ranking), a restrictive theory of syllabic representation (without the codas constituent and with exclusively binary branching), theories of the phonology-phonetics interface in which phonology is motivated independently of phonetics, and the metatheoretical flaws in a number of widely accepted but rarely questioned views on phonology.

Contents:
L. Nickels, Therapy for Naming Disorders: Revisiting, Revising and Reviewing. A. Raymer, T. Ellsworth, Response to Contrasting Verb Retrieval Treatments: A Case Study. L. Nickels, Improving Word Finding: Practice Makes (Closer to) Perfect? M. Rose, J. Douglas, T. Matyas, The Comparative Effectiveness of Gesture and Verbal Treatments for a Specific Phonologic Naming Impairment. R.B. Fink, A. Brecher, M.F. Schwartz, R.R. Robey, A Computer Implemented Protocol for Treatment of Naming Disorders: Evaluation of Clinician-guided and Partially Self-guided Instruction. S. Franklin, F. Buerk, D. Howard, Generalised Improvement in Speech Production for a Subject with Reproduction Conduction Aphasia. J. Hickin, Phonological Therapy for Word-finding Difficulties: A Re-evaluation. B. Biedermann, G. Blanken, L. Nickels, The Representation of Homophones: Evidence from Remediation.

This text is an analysis of the aspects of sound in James Joyce's book "Finnegans Wake". It considers phonetic symbolism, rhythm, pitch-contours, motifs and songs in a way which shows how Joyce's work has a genuinely musical layer that is particularly apparent when the book is read aloud. The assumption that there is no relationship, other than an arbitrary one, between sound and meaning is seriously challenged. Peter Myers is the author of "An Introduction to "Five Sisters", York" and "Rice Krispies".

This book contrasts variations in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, using as a reference for discussion the mainstream careful speech of news anchors at the national level or the equivalent type of speech: a well-educated style that nonetheless sounds natural. Pursuing an innovative approach, the book uses this view of language as a cornerstone to describe and discuss other social and regional variants relative to that speaking register. It is aimed at speakers of Spanish interested in learning Portuguese and speakers of Portuguese who want to learn Spanish, as well as language specialists interested in bilingualism, heritage languages, in the teaching of typologically similar languages in contrast, and readers with interest in Phonetics and Phonology. The book employs a variety of innovative approaches, especially the reinterpretation of some of the traditional concept in Phonetics, and the use of speech prosodies and speech melodies, a user-friendly strategy to describe speech prosody in languages and speech melody in music through musical notation.

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 /I/ 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.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

Techniques in Speech Acoustics provides an introduction to the acoustic analysis and characteristics of speech sounds. The first part of the book covers aspects of the source-filter decomposition of speech, spectrographic analysis, the acoustic theory of speech production and acoustic phonetic cues. The second part is based on computational techniques for analysing the acoustic speech signal including digital time and frequency analyses, formant synthesis, and the linear predictive coding of speech. There is also an introductory chapter on the classification of acoustic speech signals which is relevant to aspects of automatic speech and talker recognition. Included with the book is a CD-ROM containing extensive speech corpora, the EMU speech analysis tools, extensions to the X-LISP-STAT programming language that are adapted to speech analysis, and numerous exercises that are linked to the major themes of the book and which can be run on Windows-95 and UNIX platforms. The book and CD-ROM are intended for use as teaching materials on undergraduate and postgraduate speech acoustics and experimental phonetics courses; they are also aimed at researchers from phonetics, linguistics, computer science, psychology and engineering who wish to gain an understanding of the basis of speech acoustics and its application to fields such as speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition.

Applying insights from variationist linguistics to historical change mechanisms that have affected the consonantal system of English, Daniel Schreier reports findings from a historical corpus-based study on the reduction of particular consonant clusters and compares them with similar processes in synchronic varieties, thus defining consonantal change as a phenomenon involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonological theory and contact linguistics. Moreover, he weighs the impact of external and internal effects on causation, examining data from a total of fifteen varieties with different time depths and social histories.

Phonology is the study of the properties of sound systems, the principles that govern the ways in which speakers of different languages organise speech sounds to express meanings. It is an old discipline, reaching back to ancient India, and a thriving ever-changing part of the modern science of linguistics, investigating language facts, posing new questions, formulating new ways of analysing, and spawning different theoretical viewpoints. Keeping up with developments in the field is difficult because output is great and many essays appear in publications of limited circulation. This volume brings together over a hundred previously published book chapters and articles from professional journals. These have been chosen for their relevance in the exploration of theoretical questions, with some preference for essays that are not easily accessible. Divided into sections, each part is preceded by a brief introduction which aims to point out the problems addressed by the various articles and show their relation to one another.

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 fourth volume in a series on the languages of Amazonia. This volume includes grammatical descriptions of Wai Wai, Warekena, a comparative survey of morphosyntactic features of the Tupi-Guarani languages, and a paper on interclausal reference phenomena in Amahuaca.

This work provides a detailed account of word level pronunciation in England and Scotland between 1700 and 1900. All major and minor source materials are presented in depth and there is a close discussion of contemporary attitudes to pronunciation standards and orthographic reform. The materials are presented in three chronological periods: 1700-1750, 1750-1800 and the Nineteenth century, so that the reader is able not only to see the main characteristics of the pronunciation of both vowels and consonants in each period, but can also compare developments from one period to another, thus identifying ongoing changes to the phonology.

British English Phonetic Transcription provides an accessible introduction to phonemic, phonetic and intonational transcription with a focus on British English. Featuring exercises, revision tasks and recordings to help students gain hands-on practice, the book takes a learning-by-doing approach and ensures students gain practice using each new symbol or concept introduced before moving on to the next. Consisting of three parts, the book covers: transcribing individual words, including consonants, vowels, primary stress, secondary stress, syllabic consonants and inflections; transcribing phrases and sentences, including liaison, weak forms, elision and assimilation; transcribing intonation, including the structure of English intonation and recognising pitch patterns. Ideally suited as a standalone workbook or for use alongside American English Phonetic Transcription, British English Phonetic Transcription is key reading for undergraduate students of linguistics as well as anyone teaching or learning English as a foreign language.

According to well-established views, language has several subsystems where each subsystem (e.g. syntax, morphology, phonology) operates on the basis of hierarchically organised units. When it comes to the graphematic structure of words, however, the received view appears to be that linear structure is all that matters. Contrary to this view, a sub-field of writing systems research emerges that can be called non-linear or supra-segmental graphematics. Drawing on parallels with supra-segmental phonology, supra-segmental graphematics claims the existence and relevance of cross-linguistically available building blocks, such as the syllable and the foot, in alphabetical writing systems, such as the writing systems of German and English. This book explores the graphematic hierarchy with a special focus on the unit foot. Structural, experimental and databased evidence is presented in favour of this approach. In addition, analyses within the optimality theory framework are offered. This work shows that the supra-segmental graphematic approaches are superior to linear ones with respect to explanatory strength and even preciseness of the description. It is thus interesting for academics concerned with writing systems and orthography teaching.

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.