This book gives true characters of Japanese speech sounds in reference to European speech sounds. When it was first published in 1931, it was the first book of its kind. There are only 5 Japanese vowel elements as opposed to 18 in English, 13 in French and 8 in German. There are 15 Japanese consonants, 26 in English, 22 in French & 23 in German. Because of the lesser number of elements, it follows that the wider range in vowels and consonants is heard by Japanese ears, so this volume gives average sounds uttered by Japanese in the twentieth century in relation to the English sounds.

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, second edition offers an innovative and detailed examination of recent developments in phonology, and the implications of these within linguistic theory and related disciplines. * Revised from the ground-up for the second edition, the book is comprised almost entirely of newly-written and previously unpublished chapters * Addresses the important questions in the field including learnability, phonological interfaces, tone, and variation, and assesses the findings and accomplishments in these domains * Brings together a renowned and international contributor team * Offers new and unique reflections on the advances in phonological theory since publication of the first edition in 1995 * Along with the first edition, still in publication, it forms the most complete and current overview of the subject in print

Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher's theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher's and Bekesy's approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds -10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian "the Slavic Group," 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions: Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility? The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, a over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).

The work published in Phonology and Phonetic Evidence presents an integrated phonetics-phonology approach in what has become an established field, laboratory phonology. This 1995 volume is divided into three sections. Part I deals with the status and role of features in phonological representations; Part II, on prosody, contains, amongst others, two papers which present for the first time detailed acoustic and perceptual evidence on the rhythm rule; and Part III, on articulatory organisation, includes several papers which from different perspectives test hypotheses derived from articulatory phonology, thereby testifying to the great influence this theory has exerted in recent years. This, the fourth in the series of Papers in Laboratory Phonology, will be welcomed by all those interested in phonetics, phonology and their interface.

This volume addresses several claims about the two prominence patterns found in English nominal compounds in a rigorously empirical way. Listener proficiency to identify these patterns is investigated, and the acoustic properties that distinguish the patterns are identified. These properties are used to predict statistically the prominence pattern of any given compound. The book further analyzes the semantic and structural factors influencing the distribution of the prominence patterns, and addresses the extent of within- and across-speaker variability in English compound stress assignment.

This volume is the first comprehensive handbook of Japanese phonetics and phonology describing the basic phonetic and phonological structures of modern Japanese with main focus on standard Tokyo Japanese. Its primary goal is to provide a comprehensive overview and descriptive generalizations of major phonetic and phonological phenomena in modern Japanese by reviewing important studies in the fields over the past century. It also presents a summary of interesting questions that remain unsolved in the literature. The volume consists of eighteen chapters in addition to an introduction to the whole volume. In addition to providing descriptive generalizations of empirical phonetic/phonological facts, this volume also aims to give an overview of major phonological theories including, but not restricted to, traditional generative phonology, lexical phonology, prosodic morphology, intonational phonology, and the more recent Optimality Theory. It also touches on theories of speech perception and production. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to Japanese phonetics and phonology for all interested in linguistics and speech sciences.

This book is open access under a CC BY licence. It spans the areas of assessment, second language acquisition (SLA) and pronunciation and examines topical issues and challenges that relate to formal and informal assessments of second language (L2) speech in classroom, research and real-world contexts. It showcases insights from assessing other skills (e.g. listening and writing) and highlights perspectives from research in speech sciences, SLA, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, including lingua franca communication, with concrete implications for pronunciation assessment. This collection will help to establish commonalities across research areas and facilitate greater consensus about key issues, terminology and best practice in L2 pronunciation research and assessment. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this book will appeal to a mixed audience of researchers, graduate students, teacher-educators and exam board staff with varying levels of expertise in pronunciation and assessment and wide-ranging interests in applied linguistics.

The traditional dialect spoken in the Shetland Isles, the northernmost part of Scotland and Britain, is highly distinct. It displays distinct, characteristic features on all linguistic levels and particularly in its sound system, or its phonology. The dialect is one of the lesser- known varieties of English within the Inner Circle. Increasing interest in the lesser- known varieties of English in recent years has brought a realization that there are still blanks on the map, even within the very core of the Inner Circle. Sundkvist's comprehensive treatise draws upon results from a three- year research project funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, for which a phonological survey of the Shetland dialect was carried out between 2010 and 2012. This book is a useful resource for those working on historical linguistics and is intended to serve as a comprehensive description and accessible reference source on one of the most distinct lesser- known varieties of English within Britain. It documents and offers a systematic account of the rich regional variation as well as being a reference source for those studying the historical formation and emergence of the Shetland dialect and language variation and change in Shetland, as well as those within the broader field of Germanic linguistics.

English has long been suspected to be a vowel-shifting language. This hypothesis, often only adumbrated in previous work, is closely investigated in this book. Framed within a novel framework combining evolutionary linguistics and Optimality Theory, the account proposed here argues that the replacement of duration by quality as the primary cue to signaling vowel oppositions has resulted in the 'shiftiness' of many post-medieval English varieties.

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of mana (TM)s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

This 1991 book was the first extended study written within the framework of Government Phonology. Following the presentation of the main aspects of this theory, the process of vowel-zero alternations is addressed and analysed together with the idea that phonological processes are determined by principles of Universal Grammar along with parameters that distinguish languages. By using predominantly the alternation between schwa and zero in French, Monik Charette demonstrates that vowel-zero alternations are neither cases of insertion nor of deletion. Rather, they involve the interpretation of 'empty nuclei', i.e. nuclei with no segmental content, which must be licensed by proper government. It is when proper government fails to apply that a vowel is realized. Dr Charette also gives consideration to the constraints to which proper government is subject. She argues that these constraints result from phonological principles in conflict. This book represents a major development in the analysis of phonological processes. The extension of grammatical principles and parameters to phonological phenomena is well argued, and will interest theoretical phonologists and specialists of French alike.

The breakthrough of the alphabetic script early in the first millennium BCE coincides with the appearance of several new languages and civilizations in ancient Syria-Palestine. Together, they form the cultural setting in which ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and, transformed by Hellenism, the New Testament took shape. This book contains concise yet thorough and lucid overviews of ancient Near Eastern languages united by alphabetic writing and illuminates their interaction during the first 1000 years of their attestation. All chapters are informed by the most recent scholarship, contain fresh insights, provide numerous examples from the most pertinent sources, and share a clear historical framework that makes it easier to trace processes of contact and convergence in this highly diversified speech area. They also address non-specialists. The following topics are discussed: Alphabetic writing (A. Millard), Ugaritic (A. Gianto), Phoenician and Hebrew (H. Gzella), Transjordanian languages (K. Beyer), Old and Imperial Aramaic (M. Folmer), Epigraphic South Arabian (R. Hasselbach), Old Persian (M. de Vaan/A. Lubotsky), Greek (A. Willi).

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.

This book presents an experimental-phonetic approach to the study of intonation, defined as the ensemble of pitch variations in speech. It brings together in a single volume a detailed explication of the stylization method used in the analysis of intonation; theoretical insights and the experimental evidence that supports them, the results of physiological measurements that substantiate hypotheses about the production of intonation; and applications arising from the research. Johan't Hart, Rene Collier and Antonie Cohen argue that a perception-oriented approach, carried out by studying the perceptual consequences of deliberate manipulations of the speech signal, is the only way in which it can be decided what, out of the abundant information in the acoustic domain, is important for the listener and hence may be relevant for communication. The method they employ is fruitful not only for the analysis of Dutch, but also of British English, German and Russian intonation.

This book makes an important contribution to the expanding body of work in generative phonology which aims to reduce the number of traditionally recognized melodic categories in order to achieve a greater degree of restrictiveness. By analyzing data from a large number of different languages, Nasukawa establishes a clear affinity between nasality and voicing, and demonstrates the advantages of treating these two properties as different phonetic manifestations of a single nasal-voice category. The choice of whether to interpret this category as voicing or nasality is determined by the active or inactive status of a complement tier; when active, this complement tier enhances the acoustic image of its head category and is interpreted as voicing. This study deepens our understanding of the typological relation between nasality and voicing, and sheds new light on a number of related agreement phenomena such as nasal harmony, postnasal voicing assimilation, voiced-obstruent voicing assimilation and spontaneous prenasalisation.

The topic of the book is the relationship between mind and language on all levels of linguistic research. Over the past decade, the cognitive approach to language and its methodology have started to permeate other areas of linguistic study, which, in turn, is opening up room for new types of research and resulting in new knowledge that contributes to explaining not only the linguistic phenomena, but also how they function in a linguistic community and contemporary society. The book tries to reflect these new developments. It consists of 11 chapters organized into three thematic sections: language and mind from linguistic perspective, the language and mind of the translator, and language and mind from the teacher's perspective.

English-based Mandarin loanwords are commonly used in Chinese people's daily lives. Mandarin Loanwords demonstrates how English phonemes map into Mandarin phonemes through Mandarin loanwords adaptation. The consonantal adaptations are the most important in the analyses, and vowel adaptation and tonal adaptation is also considered. Through the analysis, it is proven that the functions of phonology and phonetics play a significant role in Mandarin loanword adaptation, however the functions of other factors, such as semantic functions of Chinese characters and English orthography, are also discussed. Additionally, the phonetic symbolization of Chinese characters is mentioned.

The term Sino-Korean may refer to either the phonological system or vocabulary in Korean that is of Chinese origin. Along with the borrowing of Chinese characters, the Chinese readings of characters must also have been transmitted into Korean. A Study of Sino-Korean Phonology aims to contribute to the field of Sino-Korean phonology by re-examining the origin and layers of Sino-Korean pronunciations from a loanword phonology perspective. The central issues of this book include an ongoing discussion on the questions of which Chinese dialect Sino-Korean is based on and how the source form in Chinese was adapted into Korean. Last is an in-depth analysis of the layers of Sino-Korean.

This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus in the architecture of grammar, linguists investigate the architecture of focus itself. The central underlying idea of this collection is to document this change in perspective with the aim of isolating essential keystones and research areas in both the theoretical and empirical domain. The book is structured accordingly. Following the introduction, there are four main sections: The general section discusses the theoretical foundations of focus within grammar. The second section hosts papers which investigate the representation of focus and topic at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The third section discusses the phonological representation of focus and its relation to meaning. The papers of the final section investigate different types of focus constructions in a variety languages. The collection of papers on the architecture of focus, its interpretation and representation mirror the establishment of the focus research field.

This is a reissue in paperback of the second edition of Professor Allen's highly successful book on the pronunciation of Latin in Rome in the Golden Age. In the second edition the text of the first edition is reprinted virtually unchanged but is followed by a section of supplementary notes that deal with subsequent developments in the subject. The author also added an appendix on the names of the letters of the Latin alphabet and a select bibliography.

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 book aims to expose a panchronic outlook on motivation behind the word within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics. On the example of girl and woman used in "Dubliners", the author emphasises the impact of culture on human conceptualisation which, in turn, can be traced in language. The results of her analysis reveal that the linguistic sign is not an arbitrary pairing of form and meaning, but rather a language unit motivated by culture. This book will be of interest to those who wish to look more closely at the relationship between language, culture and human mind. Readers interested in Joyce will also find a great dose of cultural and biographical facts related to his life as well as his vision of females as conceptualised in "Dubliners".

This book brings together papers on various aspects of prosodic development from a generative linguistic perspective. It addresses issues such as the relationship between tone, stress and quantity, the evidence for prosodic change from metrics and discusses the role of analogy, language contact, and language acquisition in change. The unique combination of different methodologies and perspectives investigating development in prosodic systems provides a new and broader scope on historical linguistics.

First published in 1976. This title presents a study of Yucatec Maya segmental phonology by children. The aim of the study is to describe the phonological systems revealed in the speech of group of children in order to determine the kinds of structural differences which exist among these pedolectal variants. This title will be of great interest to students of linguistics.

First published in 1988. This study examines a number of issues arising in multitiered nonlinear phonology in the light of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which prohibits adjacent identical elements at the melodic level, and aims to provide another kind of evidence for segment-internal tier articulation. This title will be of particular interest to students of linguistics.