This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns.
Martin Kramer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses. His accounts of the main aspects and characteristics of Italian phonology are couched in the framework of Optimality Theory, but he keeps formal aspects and theory-internal matters to a minimum and separate from the presentation and description of the data. His exposition is thus fully accessible to students and researchers who are not familiar with or do not subscribe to the tenets of the theory. Individual chapters may thus serve as starting points for in-depth investigations into particular aspects of Italian phonology in whatever framework the reader chooses to employ.
The Phonology of Italian is the first fully comprehensive account of its subject for many years. It will interest scholars and advanced students of Italian, Romance phonology, and phonology as a system.
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The impact of phonology on word order phenomena has become a central research agenda ever since the Minimalist Program emphasised the role of interface conditions on syntactic operations. This book is a detailed study of extraposition from NP, which has traditionally been the domain of syntactic investigation and information-structural studies. After an examination of syntactic accounts of PP and relative clause extraposition, which are largely found inadequate, it explores the possibility of phonological solutions by comparing the prosodic structure of canonical and extraposed word orders. Particular attention is payed to the informational status of extraposed constituents and the focus structure of the sentence. The book shows that extraposition optimises the prosodic structure of sentences and in some cases their rhythmic structure, while focus structure only plays a role in extraposition of defocused constituents. The book further argues that extraposition occurs at PF, while certain binding-theoretical consequences of extraposition can be resolved by LF movement. With its focus on the interface between syntax and phonology, the book will appeal to researchers working on either domain.

This book investigates the changes that affected vowel length during the development of Latin into the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. pila 'ball' vs. pila 'pile', like English bit vs. beat), but no modern Romance language has retained that same contrast. However, many non-standard Romance dialects (as well as French, up to the early 20th century) have developed novel vowel length contrasts, which are investigated in detail here. Unlike previous studies of this phenomenon, this book combines detailed historical evidence spanning three millennia (as attested by extant texts) with extensive data from present-day Romance varieties collected from first-hand fieldwork, which are subjected to both phonological and experimental phonetic analysis. Professor Loporcaro puts forward a detailed account of the loss of contrastive vowel length in late Latin, showing that this happened through the establishment of a process which lengthened all stressed vowels in open syllables, as in modern Italian casa ['ka:sa]. His analysis has implications for many of the most widely-debated issues relating to the origin of novel vowel length contrasts in Romance, which are also shown to have been preserved to different degrees in different areas. The detailed investigation of the rise and fall of vowel length in dozens of lesser-known (non-standard) varieties is crucial in understanding the development of this aspect of Romance historical phonology, and will be of interest not only to researchers and students in comparative Romance linguistics, but also, more generally, to phonologists and those interested in historical linguistics beyond the Latin-Romance language family.

This work presents a new stance on the presentation of basic phonetic skills for students of linguistics, using examples drawn from a wide-range of languages. "Continuum Critical Introductions to Linguistics" present core areas of linguistics from refreshing new perspectives. This book takes a new stance phonetics and will interest students of linguistics. Using examples drawn from a wide-range of languages Ken Lodge introduces the key aspects of phonetics, examining the difference between speech and writing, the physiology of speech production, basic and detailed articulation, and acoustic phonetics. The book contains a practical guide to transcriptions from sound recordings, and a section on applications of phonetics to fields of study such as language variation and accent."A Critical Introduction to Phonetics" provides comprehensive coverage of all the key areas of the subject, and contains chapter summaries to help the reader navigate the text. Critical thinking is prompted throughout, and this will be essential reading for students on introductory phonetics courses both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. "Continuum Critical Introductions to Linguistics" are comprehensive introductions to core areas in linguistics. The introductions are original and approach the subject from unique and different perspectives. Using contemporary examples and analogies, these books seek to explain complicated issues in an accessible way. The books prompt critical thinking about each core area, and are a radical departure from traditional, staid introductions to the subject. Written by key academics in each field who are not afraid to be controversial, each book will be essential reading for undergraduate students.

This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.

The painful and baffling mystery as to why some obviously bright children do not begin talking until long after the "normal" time is explored in this book through personal experiences and the findings of scientific research. The author's own experiences as the father of such a child led to the formation of a group of more than fifty sets of parents of similar children. The anguish and frustration of these parents as they try to cope with children who do not talk and institutions that do not understand them is a remarkable and moving human story. Fortunately, some of these children turn out to have not only normal intelligence but even outstanding abilities, especially in highly analytical fields such as mathematics and computers. Public figures who were late in talking include the distinguished mathematician Julia Robinson, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and - the most famous of all - Albert Einstein. Fascinating stories of late-talking children and the remarkable families from which they come are followed by explorations of recent scientific research that throws light on the unusual development patterns of such children.

The comprehensive analysis of the segmental and metrical system of the Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian provides a significant contribution to both phonetic and phonological theory. Based on the author's original fieldwork and experimental investigations, it is the first in-depth study of this area, tracing it back also to its Old High German roots, particularly that of the dialect of Notker. Quantity alternations - notably word-initial long/short consonantal alternations - asymmetric neutralization of phonetic-phonological contrasts, stress and weight are most prominent among the theoretical issues on which Thurgovian phonology is brought to bear.

Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure presents an overall view of the nature of prosodic features of language - accent, stress, rhythm, tone, pitch, and intonation - and shows how these connect to sound systems and meaning. This invaluable survey will appeal to linguists at all levels, in particular to phonologists, phoneticians, and researchers in related applied fields such as speech pathology and speech synthesis.

Sound Patterns of Spoken English is a concise, to-the-point compendium of information about the casual pronunciation of everyday English as compared to formal citation forms. The book examines changes that occur to certain sounds and in certain parts of words and syllables in the casual, unmonitored speech of native English speakers. It outlines major phonological processes found in conversational English; reviews and criticizes attempts to include these processes in phonological theory; and surveys experimental approaches to explaining casual English pronunciation. Among the varieties of English covered are General American and Standard Southern British, but many other accents are mentioned, especially those of mainland Britain. Sound Patterns of Spoken English is of interest to students and scholars in a wide variety of fields, including sociolinguistics, lexicography, rhetoric, language learning and speech sciences, and has an accompanying website - http://www. blackwellpublishing. com/shockey - with examples from different accents.

This book presents an exhaustive treatment of a long-standing problem of Proto-Indo-European and Italic philology: the development of the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates in the ancient languages of Italy. In so doing it tackles a central issue of historical linguistics: the plausibility of explanations for sound change. The author argues that the problem can be resolved by combining a traditional philological investigation with experimental phonetics. Philological methods enable the presentation of the first integrated account of the evidence for the Italic languages, with detailed discussion of languages other than Latin. Theory and methods from experimental phonetics are then adopted to offer a new explanation for how the sound change might have taken place. At the same time, phonetic methods also confirm the traditional reconstruction of voiced aspirates for Proto-Indo-European. Thus the book offers a case-study of the successful application of synchronic theory and method to a problem of diachrony.

Portuguese is a Romance language bearing close links with Spanish and Catalan. In this book, the authors provide an accurate description of the phonological system of Portuguese, comparing the main phenomena of the two most widely extended varieties of the languageDSEuropean Portuguese and Brazilian PortugueseDSwithin the light of current phonological theories. This book's importance and interest lie in the unique characteristics that give Portuguese a special place among the Romance languages.

This book introduces a new topic to applied linguistics: the significance of the TESOL teacher's background as a learner and user of additional languages. The development of the global TESOL profession as a largely English-only enterprise has led to the accepted view that, as long as the teacher has English proficiency, then her or his other languages are irrelevant. The book questions this view. Learners are in the process of becoming plurilingual, and this book argues that they are best served by a teacher who has experience of plurilingualism. The book proposes a new way of looking at teacher linguistic identity by examining in detail the rich language biographies of teachers: of growing up with two or more languages; of learning languages through schooling or as an adult, of migrating to another linguaculture, of living in a plurilingual family and many more. The book examines the history of language-in-education policy which has led to the development of the TESOL profession in Australia and elsewhere as a monolingual enterprise. It shows that teachers' language backgrounds have been ignored in teacher selection, teacher training and ongoing professional development. The author draws on literature in teacher cognition, bilingualism studies, intercultural competence, bilingual lifewriting and linguistic identity to argue that languages play a key part in the development of teachers' professional beliefs, identity, language awareness and language learning awareness. Drawing on three studies involving 115 teachers from Australia and seven other countries, the author demonstrates conclusively that large numbers of teachers do have plurilingual experiences; that these experiences are ignored in the profession, but that they have powerful effects on the formation of beliefs about language learning and teaching which underpin good practice. Those teachers who identify as monolingual almost invariably have some language learning experience, but it was low-level, short-lived and unsuccessful. How does the experience of successful or unsuccessful language learning and language use affect one's identity, beliefs and practice as an English language teacher? What kinds of experience are most beneficial? These concepts and findings have implications for teacher language education, teacher professional development and the current calls for increased plurilingual practices in the TESOL classroom.

This edited volume investigates the role of phonetics and phonology in psycholinguistics. Speaking and understanding spoken language both engage phonological and phonetic knowledge. There are detailed models of phonological and phonetic encoding in language production and there are equally refined models of phonetic and phonological processing in language comprehension. However, since most psycholinguists work on either language production or comprehension, the relationship between the two has received surprisingly little attention. Prominent researchers in various areas of psycholinguistics were invited to discuss this relationship focusing on the phonological and phonetic components.

SELF IMPROVEMENTWhat do getting a job, earning a promotion, making the right friends, and boosting your confidence all have in common? Doing each one of those things is a whole lot easier when you can speak and write without making grammatical mistakes. Just ask any hiring manager, senior-level executive, or neighbor next door.In this guide, author Patricia Blaine, a longtime professional writer, gives you the tools you need to write and speak effectively. You can learn how to - avoid common mistakes in verbal and written communications; - speak clearly--even practice with tongue twisters; - master the usage of pronouns, prepositions, and basic punctuation; - finally master correlative conjunctions; - organize an effective resume and cover letter; and - boost your overall vocabulary.By using everyday examples of proper and improper usage, Blaine makes it clear which words and cliches to avoid. Start putting your words to work for you, and beat your competitors seeking jobs, promotions, and advantages in everyday life with the practical advice in Change Your Words, Change Your Worth.

All human speech has expression. It is part of the 'humanness' of speech, and is a quality listeners expect to find. Without expression, speech sounds lifeless and artificial. Remove expression, and what's left is the bare bones of the intended message, but none of the feelings which surround the message. The purpose of this book is to present research examining expressive content in speech with a view to simulating expression in computer speech. Human beings communicate expressively with each other in conversation: now in the computer age there is a perceived eed for machines to communicate expressively with humans in dialogue.

The "smart mobile" has become an essential and inseparable part of our lives. This powerful tool enables us to perform multi-tasks in different modalities of voice, text, gesture, etc. The user plays an important role in the mode of operation, so multimodal interaction provides the user with new complex multiple modalities of interfacing with a system, such as speech, touch, type and more. The book will discuss the new world of mobile multimodality, focusing on innovative technologies and design which create a state-of-the-art user interface. It will examine the practical challenges entailed in meeting commercial deployment goals, and offer new approaches to the designing such interfaces. A multimodal interface for mobile devices requires the integration of several recognition technologies together with sophisticated user interface and distinct tools for input and output of data. The book will address the challenge of designing devices in a synergetic fashion which does not burden the user or to create a technological overload.

The book contains a collection of papers dealing with the question of how rhythm shapes language. Until now, there was no comprehensive theory that addressed these findings adequately. By bringing together researchers from many different fields, this book will make a first attempt to fill this gap.

An in-depth analysis of the problems of learning a second language as experienced by a family of learners. This is a study of the phonological development of a group of L2 English learners. It is the first full-length book that focuses on a tightly-knit group of learners' acquisition of phonology over a period of years, and the first book to study both social and linguistic factors across that time period. Jette Hansen analyses this data gathered from actual language learners in terms of recent theory, as well as challenging aspects of current thinking on the subject of second language acquisition. Acquiring a Non-Native Phonology therefore makes an important and original contribution to the field, and provides an in-depth analysis and discussion of the developmental processes in acquiring a non-native sound system which has not previously been presented. The book is aimed at academics interested in second language acquisition, and researchers studying phonology in general.

Aims and Scope Patients are more empowered to shape their own health care today than ever before. Health information technologies are creating new opportunities for patients and families to participate actively in their care, manage their medical problems and improve communication with their healthcare providers. Moreover, health information technologies are enabling healthcare providers to partner with their patients in a bold effort to optimize quality of care, improve health outcomes and transform the healthcare system on the macro-level. In this book, leading figures discuss the existing needs, challenges and opportunities for improving patient engagement and empowerment through health information technology, mapping out what has been accomplished and what work remains to truly transform the care we deliver and engage patients in their care. Policymakers, healthcare providers and administrators, consultants and industry managers, researchers and students and, not least, patients and their family members should all find value in this book. "In the exciting period that lies just ahead, more will be needed than simply connecting patients to clinicians, and clinicians to each other. The health care systems that will be most effective in meeting patients' needs will be those that can actually design their 'human wares' around that purpose. This book provides deep insight into how information technology can and will support that redesign." Thomas H. Lee, MD, MSc, Chief Medical Officer, Press Ganey Associates; Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health The Editors: Drs. Maria Adela Grando, Ronen Rozenblum and David W. Bates are widely recognized professors, researchers and experts in the domain of health information technology, patient engagement and empowerment. Their research, lectures and contributions in these domains have been recognized nationally and internationally. Dr. Grando is affiliated with Arizona State University and the Mayo Clinic, and Drs. Rozenblum and Bates are affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard University.

The integration of traditional and modern linguistics as well as diachrony and synchrony is the hallmark of an influential trend in contemporary research on language. It is documented in the present collection of 21 new papers on the history and structure of the sounds and other (sub-) systems of human languages, sharing the common reference point of Theo Vennemann, a leading figure in the above-mentioned trend, whom the authors want to honor with this Festschrift.

This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world's languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world's languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.

This volume advances our understanding of how word structure in terms of affix ordering is organized in the languages of the world. A central issue in linguistic theory, affix ordering receives much attention amongst the research community, though most studies deal with only one language. By contrast, the majority of the chapters in this volume consider more than one language and provide data from typologically diverse languages, some of which are examined for the first time. Many chapters focus on cases of affix ordering that challenge linguistic theory with such phenomena as affix repetition and variable ordering, both of which are shown to be neither rare nor typical only of lesser-studied languages with unstable grammatical organization, as previously assumed. The book also offers an explicit discussion on the non-existence of phonological affix ordering, with a focus on mobile affixation, and one on the emergence of affix ordering in child language, the first of its kind in the literature. Repetitive operations, undesirable in many theories, are frequent in early child language and seem to serve as trainings for morphological decomposition and affix stacking. Thus, the volume also raises important questions regarding the general architecture of grammar and the nature and side effects of our theoretical assumptions.

In the 1990's, the focus of phonological studies has changed from rule-based analysis to constraint-based analysis. The study of Chinese phonology has also undergone such a change, as have other area studies in Generative Phonology. Why and how this change has occurred, the difference between the two kinds of analyses, and what has really happened in phonology after the change are the primary concerns of linguists and anyone interested in the study of Generative Phonology or other area studies in Generative Linguistics. To answer these questions, one must: (1) review the developing process of the change, (2) compare the two kinds of analyses in terms of their different frameworks and research focuses, and (3) profile the studies in phonology (in any area studies) in recent years.
Chinese Phonology in Generative Grammar is intended to offer such a review and comparison while outlining the studies in Chinese phonology.
Eight unpublished papers written by seven authors are selected to cover the areas of field-work, dialectology, and synchronic studies of segmental and tonal systems of the Chinese language family. These papers are directly related to the theoretical issues in: (1) The SPE Model; (2) Lexical Phonology and Morphology; (3) Autosegmental Phonology; (4) Metrical Phonology; and (5) Optimality Theory.
By putting the study of Chinese phonology into the generative perspective, this collection provides useful data for further theoretical work and draw significant feedback to the theory of Generative Phonology.
Key Features
* Review the theoretical development from rule-based analysis to constraint-based analysis in the study of Generative Phonology over the lastthree decades
* Compare the two kinds of analyses with respect to their different frameworks and research focuses and their relations with each other in Generative Phonology
* Profile the study of Chinese phonology in recent years by putting it into the generative perspective

The book analyzes the articulatory motivation of several adaptation processes (place assimilations, blending, coarticulation) involving consecutive consonants in heterosyllabic consonant sequences within the framework of the degree of articulatory constraint model of coarticulation. It also shows that the homorganic relationship between two heterosyllabic consonants contributes to the implementation of manner assimilations, while heterorganicity as well as sonorancy and voicing in the syllable-onset C2 are key factors in the weakening of the syllable-coda C1. Experimental and descriptive evidence is provided with production, phonological and sound change data from several languages, and more especifically with tongue-to-palate contact and lingual configuration data for Catalan consonant sequences. The book also reviews critically research on the c-center effect in tautosyllabic consonant sequences which has been carried out during the last thirty years.