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 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.

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.

Raymond Harris-Northall uses the distinctive features of generative phonology to present synchronic and diachronic rules, but exploits the evidence of the history of the Spanish sound system to show that the 'simplicity' required by the generativists often obscures rather than illuminates the way in which changes develop from small beginnings. Instead, he illustrates the essential need to recognise the relevance of syllable structure constraints, which, allied with a complex but justified and helpful presentation of the relevant strength hierarchies, allow him not only to describe but to explain how changes began in the most suitable phonetic environments and then spread to subsequent items on the hierarchy over time. The result is the most serious and detailed application of strength hierarchy theory that has yet been made to a coherent body of historical data from two millennia of attestations, data that is interesting in its own right, and amenable to the theory.

In this classic edition of their ground-breaking work, Usha Goswami and Peter Bryant revisit their influential theory about how phonological skills support the development of literacy. The book describes three causal factors which can account for children's reading and spelling development: pre-school phonological knowledge of rhyme and alliteration the impact of alphabetic instruction on knowledge about phonemes links between early spelling and later reading. This classic edition includes a new introduction from the authors which evaluates research from the past 25 years. Examining new evidence from auditory neuroscience, statistical modelling and orthographic database analyses, as well as new data from cognitive developmental psychology and educational studies, the authors consider how well their original ideas have stood up to the test of time. Phonological Skills and Learning to Read will continue to be essential reading for students and researchers in language and literacy development, and those involved in teaching children to read.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference that solves many classic problems relating to the topic.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study provides an illuminating and ground-breaking account of the complex interaction of intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch accents - Focus and Topic - is developed. The cross-sentence, as well as the sentence internal semantic effects of these accents, follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montogovian possible world semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.

It seems as if the fundamentals of how we produce vowels and how they are acoustically represented have been clarified: we phonate and articulate. Using our vocal chords, we produce a vocal sound or noise which is then shaped into a specific vowel sound by the resonances of the pharyngeal, oral, and nasal cavities, that is, the vocal tract. Accordingly, the acoustic description of vowels relates to vowelspecific patterns of relative energy maxima in the sound spectra, known as patterns of formants. The intellectual and empirical reasoning presented in this treatise, however, gives rise to scepticism with respect to this understanding of the sound of the vowel. The reflections and materials presented provide reason to argue that, up to now, a comprehensible theory of the acoustics of the voice and of voiced speech sounds is lacking, and consequently, no satisfying understanding of vowels as an achievement and particular formal accomplishment of the voice exists. Thus, the question of the acoustics of the vowel - and with it the question of the acoustics of the voice itself - proves to be an unresolved fundamental problem.

This study is the first book-length examination of ejectives and their phonological patterning, deepening the empirical understanding of ejectives and contributing to both phonological theory and to typologies of sound change.

In Expressing Silence: Where Language and Culture Meet in Japanese, Natsuko Tsujimura discusses how silence is conceptualized and linguistically represented in Japanese. Languages differ widely in the specific linguistic and rhetorical modes through which vivid depictions of silence are achieved. In Japanese, sounds coming from insects, small animals, ocean waves, and leaves all evoke silence, and onomatopoeia plays an important role in simulating silent scenes. These linguistic mechanisms mediate the perception of the symbiotic relationship between sound and silence, a perception deeply embedded in the Japanese cultural experience. Drawing from a wide variety of rhetorical samples, Expressing Silence brings the tools of both linguistic and cultural analysis to bear in examining the remarkably rich array of representations of silence in Japanese language and culture. She finds that depictions of silence through language cannot be understood without exploring what sound or silence mean to the speakers. She analyzes a cluster of sounds in nature and onomatopoeic vocabulary for verbal portrayals of silence, consistent with a cultural pattern of practices that value sensate and affective reactions.

This book is a contribution to the study of the linguistic concept of gender. It focuses on the problem of assigning gender to animal nouns. This problem is topical in view of the fact that in present-day English, gender is a marginal grammatical category and therefore recedes into the background in descriptions of today's English. Grammatical gender is a rare topic of research, scientific discussions or papers. The detailed analysis of gender assignment to animal names is based on two subcorpora: the English edition of National Geographic and the English edition of the Journal of Zoology. The book closes with a contrastive analysis of gender markers.

This book is a detailed examination of the phonetics and phonology of consonant strength, drawing data from parallel acoustic and articulatory studies of English and Spanish, as well as a cross linguistic survey of lenition and fortition.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume was inspired by the 9th edition of the Phonetik & Phonologie conference, held in Zurich in October 2013. It includes state of the art research on phonetics and phonology in various languages and from interdisciplinary contributors. The volume is structured into the following eight sections: segmentals, suprasegmentals, articulation in spoken and sign language, perception, phonology, crowdsourcing phonetic data, second language speech, and arts (with inevitable overlap between these areas).

Written for students of linguistics, applied linguistics and speech therapy, this dictionary covers over 2,000 terms in phonetics and phonology. In addition to providing a comprehensive, yet concise, guide to an enormous number of individual terms, it also includes an explanation of the most important theoretical approaches to phonology. Its usefulness as a reference tool is further enhanced by the inclusion of pronunciations, notational devices and symbols, earliest sources of terms, suggestions for further reading, and advice with regard to usage. The wide range of topics explained include: * Classical phonology, including American Structuralism and the Prague School * Contemporary approaches, including Autosegmental Phonology, Metrical Phonology, Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology and Lexical Phonology * Prosodic ideas in phonology, both traditional and contemporary ^ * * historical phonology * Intonation and tonology This dictionary devotes space to the various theoretical approaches in proportion to their importance, but it concentrates most heavily on non-theory-bound descriptive terminology. It will remain a definitive reference for years to come.