This book discusses the phonological consequences of the backness distinction in high vowels. It focuses on a single-phoneme approach which does not recognize the existence of the vowel y. The author demonstrates that the role of y is crucial for the analysis of Polish palatalization. If y is recognized as a separate phoneme, then the processes receive a straightforward account in Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory, the two frameworks used in the study. On the other hand, the absence of y leads to unwarranted exceptionality and entails an extensive use of diacritics or lexical constraints. The analyses show, however, that the lack of y is empirically unfeasible and requires segment indexation, a solution unheard of in phonology.

This volume is a selection of papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Middle English held at Wyzsza Szkola Filologiczna (Philological School of Higher Education) in Wroclaw, Poland, from April 30 to May 3, 2015. The contributors cover a wide range of topics in the area of language and literature. The linguistic papers constitute the majority of contributions and focus on problems from phonology to grammar, semantics and pragmatics. The literary contributions discuss various aspects of Middle English texts.

Assessment in Second Language Pronunciation highlights the importance of pronunciation in the assessment of second language speaking proficiency. Leading researchers from around the world cover practical issues as well as theoretical principles, enabling the understanding and application of the theory involved in assessment in pronunciation. Key features of this book include: Examination of key criteria in pronunciation assessment, including intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness; Exploration of the impact of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca on pronunciation assessment; Evaluation of the validity and reliability of testing, including analysis of scoring methodologies; Discussion of current and future practice in assessing pronunciation via speech recognition technology. Assessment in Second Language Pronunciation is vital reading for students studying modules on pronunciation and language testing and assessment.

This book aims to provide an account of both what and how onomatopoeia communicate by applying ideas from the relevance theoretic framework of utterance interpretation. It focuses on two main aspects of the topic: the contribution that onomatopoeia make to communication and the nature of multimodal communication. This is applied in three domains (food discourse, visual culture in Asia and translation) in the final sections of the book. It will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, stylistics, philosophy of language, literature, translation, and Asian studies.

The papers collected in this volume examine selected aspects of the interaction of phonology with phonetics, morphosyntax and the lexicon in a variety of languages including Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, British English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Dutch and Hawaiian. In order to approach the role and ways of expressing extraphonological information in phonology, the international contributors adopt different methods of analysis (data gathering, experiments, theoretical discussions), couched in various theoretical frameworks (such as Optimality Theory and Government Phonology), which reveal both the multifarious faces and interfaces of modern phonological research.

Phonology in English Language Teaching is an introductory text, specifically directed at the needs of language teachers internationally. Combining an overview of English phonology with structured practical guidance, this text shows how phonology can be applied in the classroom. An introductory chapter provides the philosophical framework, followed by separate chapters on the phonology of consonants, vowels and prosody. As well as presenting core material on English phonology, the book explores the relationship of orthography to the English sound system from a historical and a present-day perspective. The final chapter focuses on lesson design and provides practical advice to teachers on diagnosing and responding to students' pronunciation difficulties. As central themes, the book examines English seen from the perspective of international usage and considers the relationship of phonology to communication and the broader language curriculum. Consistent with its practical and communicative orientation each chapter concludes with pedagogical exercises and ideas for classroom and community research projects.

The papers collected in this volume explore the major mechanisms, that is derivations and constraints, claimed to be responsible for various aspects of the linguistic systems, their syntax, phonology and morphology. The contributors approach these issues through a detailed analysis of selected phenomena of Modern English, Old English, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and Icelandic, offering novel theoretical and descriptive insights into the working of human language.

Prosody as a system of suprasegmental linguistic information such as rhythm and intonation is a prime candidate for looking at the relation between language and music in a principled way. This claim is based on several aspects: First, prosody is concerned with acoustic correlates of language and music that are directly comparable with each other by their physical properties such as duration and pitch. Second, prosodic accounts suggest a hierarchical organization of prosodic units that not only resembles a syntactic hierarchy, but is viewed as (part of) an interface to syntax. Third, prosody provides a very promising ground for evolutionary accounts of language and music. Fourth, bilateral transfer effects between language and music are best illustrated on the level of prosody. Highlighting the first two aspects, this book shows that it is a fruitful endeavor to use prosody for a principled comparison of language and music. In its broader sense, prosody as sound structure of communicative systems may be considered a "meta"-language that formalizes the way of "how music speaks to language and vice versa". Prosody is firmly established within linguistic theory, but is also applied in the musical domain. Therefore, prosody is not just a field of inquiry that shares elements or features between music and language, but can additionally provide a common conceptual ground.

This dissertation, first published in 1980, is concerned with the role of the syllable in generative grammar. Kahn argues that the syllable is a necessary element in phonological descriptions by identifying aspects of phonology that seem to call for analysis in terms of syllabic structure and demonstrating the superiority of syllabic analyses over possible alternative solutions. This title will be of interest to students of English language and linguistics.

This work, first published in 1980, was a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. This study concerns certain aspects of the relationship between syntax and phonology in English and French. In particular, it represents an investigation of the universal conventions and language-particular readjustment rules which create the proper surface structure input to the phonological rules operating beyond the level of the word in French and English, and it offers a description of those phonological rules. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

This book, first published in 1933, examines the dialect of the people of Byers Green in County Durham. Orton explores the possible reasons behind why the dialect has signs of external influences, and the ways in which it differs to the dialects of other populations in County Durham. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

First published in 1980, this book questions many of the assumptions that have accumulated around the subject of intonation as it occurs in spontaneous speech, as well as texts read aloud. The book suggests alternative ways of examining the subject and primarily uses data derived from Edinburgh speech, which is explicitly compared with descriptions of standard southern English (RP). The book critically examines many conventional assumptions made about the formal features of intonation, particularly 'tonic' or primary stress', and about the functions of intonation, specifically rising intonation. A model of intonation is presented which demonstrates that the limited resources of intonation are exploited by several different expressive systems. This approach is justified in detailed analysis of extensive stretches of speech, supported by instrumental analysis as well as by experiments which elicit judgements by both naive and phonetically trained judges. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics, English Language, speech therapy, and English as a Foreign Language, as well as historians interested in the history of language.

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

This is a self-contained monograph on human voice. It systematically expounds a theory of voice production initiated by Leonhard Euler, through an analysis of large amount of human voice data, especially simultaneously acquired voice signals and electroglottograph signals, as well as temporal variations of pressures directly below and above the vocal folds. Its contents include the physics and physiology of human voice production, parametrical representations of voice signals, and technology applications. Background knowledge on general acoustics and mathematical tools pertinent to quantitative descriptions of human voice are explained in detail.Readers of this monograph include researchers, practitioners and students in the fields of physiology and medicine, acoustics, computer science, telecommunication, acoustic phonetics, and vocal music.

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.

For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in the popular imagination. While other projects have studied various dialect regions of New England, this is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. In New England English, James N. Stanford presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recently collected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. Stanford and his team of Dartmouth students built this dataset over 8 years of face-to-face fieldwork and online audio recordings and questionnaires. Using acoustic phonetics, computational processing, and dialect maps, the book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of geography, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors. This dataset is interpreted in terms of William Labov's outward orientation of the language faculty, dialect levelling, convergence and divergence, and "Hub social geometry." The result is a wide-ranging empirical analysis and theoretical overview of this influential English dialect region.

This volume presents the results of two tasks examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts in L2 English by college students with Cypriot Greek (CG) backgrounds. The tasks focus on the different factors affecting plosive identification and the types of errors involving plosives. With respect to the first issue, the phonetic perception of plosives turns out to be better in voiceless consonants compared to their voiced counterparts, thus providing evidence for the importance of the voicing contrast factor. With respect to the second issue, the results point to the same direction since it appears that L2 users performed significantly better in voiceless plosives. It is also indicated that they were able to perceive voiced plosives but they treated such instances as a /nasal+voiced plosive/sequence (prenasalised plosives). Therefore, the overall results seem to agree mostly with the speech perception approach suggesting that voiced plosives are realised differently in CG while the difficulties of the L2 CG users with plosives seem to be attributed to VOT differences between the L1 and the L2.

Tuvaluan is a Polynesian language spoken by the 9,000 inhabitants of the nine atolls of Tuvalu in the Central Pacific, as well as small and growing Tuvaluan communities in Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. This grammar is the first detailed description of the structure of Tuvaluan, one of the least well-documented languages of Polynesia. Tuvaluan pays particular attention to discourse and sociolinguistics factors at play in the structural organization of the language.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of papers addresses new trends in Cognitive Linguistics. Three parts of the book focus on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Integration Network Analysis. Both the theoretical contributions and the empirical case studies stress the importance of contextual factors in the meaning making processes. They employ qualitative methods to analyze the use of metaphor in political discourse and in the conceptualization of emotions. The data sets include multimodal data, sign languages and co-speech gestures. The fourth part of the book contains two corpus-based studies. The fifth part concentrates on the grammatical categories of passive voice and aspect. One contribution discusses the problem of categorization in phonology.

This book argues a fresh theory about the structure of tone. Bao investigates a wide range of tone sandhi data from various Chinese dialects and other Asian tone languages, providing empirical support for his proposal that tone is a formal entity which consists of register and contour. Bao establishes a clear typological distinction between register tone languages and contour tone languages whose contour tones have a more complex structure.

Pronunciation plays a crucial role in learning English as an international language, yet often remains marginalised by educators due to a lack of required phonetic and phonological knowledge. Pronunciation for English as an International Language bridges the gap between phonetics, phonology and pronunciation and provides the reader with a research based guide on how best to teach the English language. The book follows an easy to follow format which ensures the reader will have a comprehensive grasp of each given topic by the end of the chapter. Key ideas explored include: * Articulation of English speech sounds and basic transcription * Connected speech processes * Current issues in English language pronunciation teaching * Multimedia in English language pronunciation practice * Using speech analysis to investigate pronunciation features Using the latest research, Pronunciation for English as an International Language will facilitate effective teaching and learning for any individual involved in teaching English as a second, foreign or international language.

In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Delia Chiaro explores the pragmatics of word play, using frameworks normally adopted in descriptive linguistics. Using examples from personally recorded conversations, she examines the structure of jokes, quips, riddles and asides. Chiaro explores degrees of conformity to and deviation from established conventions; the `tellability' of jokes, and the interpretative role of the listener; the creative use of puns, word play and discourse. The emphasis in her analysis is on sociocultural contexts for the production and reception of jokes, and she examines the extent to which jokes are both universal in their appeal, and specific to a particular culture.