Sociophonetics: a student's guide provides a practical how-to' manual that will give students a clear understanding of the technical and theoretical advances in acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and recording technology which is essential for sociolinguistic research. Balancing theory, practical information and research protocol, this book: * Covers the key methodological, technical and procedural information needed to undertake sociophonetic research * Includes contributions from key academics and ground-breaking researchers * Incorporates exercises and projects in each chapter * Has a companion website that provides additional materials for students and professors, featuring exercises, links to on-line sources for specific tools and includes a large selection of audio and video clips. Sociophonetics is essential reading for graduate students and researchers with interests in sociophonetics, phonology and for those undertaking research projects in applied linguistics.

This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress, the element with the highest prominence in the sentence, is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations. Presented in a Chomskian multiple spell-out framework, the author develops the Sentential Stress Rule and provides a systematic way of accounting for a wide range of cross-linguistic facts, with data taken from Persian, English, German and Eastern Armenian. The author further proposes the Focus Stress Rule to handle the interaction between sentential structure and information structure. Sentential stress is thus determined through an interplay between two components, the default Sentential Stress Rule and the Focus Stress Rule. Syntactic phenomena are not, the author argues, triggered by phonology or prosodic motivations: the relationship between syntax and phonology is always from syntax to phonology.
This important contribution to understanding processes at the syntax-phonology interface will interest syntacticians and phonologists at graduate level and above.

This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress, the element with the highest prominence in the sentence, is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations. Presented in a Chomskian multiple spell-out framework, the author develops the Sentential Stress Rule and provides a systematic way of accounting for a wide range of cross-linguistic facts, with data taken from Persian, English, German and Eastern Armenian. The author further proposes the Focus Stress Rule to handle the interaction between sentential structure and information structure. Sentential stress is thus determined through an interplay between two components, the default Sentential Stress Rule and the Focus Stress Rule. Syntactic phenomena are not, the author argues, triggered by phonology or prosodic motivations: the relationship between syntax and phonology is always from syntax to phonology.
This important contribution to understanding processes at the syntax-phonology interface will interest syntacticians and phonologists at graduate level and above.

Phonetically Based Phonology is centred around the hypothesis that phonologies of languages are determined by phonetic principles; that is, phonetic patterns involving ease of articulation and perception are expressed linguistically as grammatical constraints. This book brings together a team of scholars to provide a wide-ranging study of phonetically based phonology. It investigates the role of phonetics in many phonological phenomena - such as assimilation, vowel reduction, vowel harmony, syllable weight, contour line distribution, metathesis, lenition, sonority sequencing, and the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) - exploring in particular the phonetic bases of phonological markedness in these key areas. The analyses also illustrate several analytical strategies whereby phonological sound patterns can be related to their phonological underpinnings. Each chapter includes a tutorial discussion of the phonetics on which the phonological discussion is based. Diverse and comprehensive in its coverage, Phonetically Based Phonology will be welcomed by all linguists interested in the relationship between phonetics and phonological theory.

Evolutionary Phonology is a theory of sound patterns which synthesizes results in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonological theory. In this book, Juliette Blevins explores the nature of sounds patterns and sound change in human language over the past 7000-8000 years, the time depth for which the comparative method is reasonably reliable. This book presents an approach to the problem of how genetically unrelated languages, from families as far apart as Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian and Indo-European, can often show similar sound patterns, and also tackles the converse problem of why there are notable exceptions to most of the patterns that are often regarded as universal tendencies or constraints. It argues that in both cases, a formal model of sound change that integrates phonetic variation and patterns of misperception can account for attested sound systems without reference to markedness or naturalness within the synchronic grammar.

Using examples from a wide variety of languages, this book reveals why speakers vary their pitch, what these variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. All languages use modulations in pitch to form utterances. Pitch modulation encodes lexical "tone" to signal boundaries between morphemes or words, and encodes "intonation" to give words and sentences an additional meaning that isn't part of their original sense.

This study presents innovative work from four core areas: phonological representations and the lexicon; phonetic interpretation and phrasal structure; phonetic interpretation and syllable structure; and phonology and natural speech production. Written by experts in the fields of phonetics, phonology and speech perception, the chapters in this volume use a wide range of laboratory and instrumental techniques to analyze the production and perception of speech. They explore the relationship between the sounds of speech and the linguistic organization that lies behind them.

This book provides the first comprehensive description of the phonology and phonetics of Standard Mongolian, known as the Halh (Khalkha) dialect and spoken in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of the Republic of Mongolia. It is also the first account in any language of the historical phonology of the entire Mongolian group of languages. The synchronic phonology is based on data collected by the authors and their own phonological analyses. The historical phonology is based on original research on the Halh, on published Chinese and Mongolian sources for the modern Mongolic languages, and on their reconstruction of Old Mongolian from the medieval written sources.

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from eliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

Thinking and speaking about time is ridden with puzzles and paradoxes. How do human beings conceptualize time? Why, for example, does the availability of tense vary in different languages? How do the lines of information from tense, aspect, temporal adverbs, and context interact in the mind? Does time describe events? If real time does not flow, where do the concepts of the past, present and future come from? Are they basic concepts or are they composed out of more primitive constituents? And, finally, what is the semantics of expressions with temporal reference? This book offers a new approach to the representation of meaning of temporally-located utterances and discourses. Temporality, the author suggests, should be taken to mean degrees of certainty, understood in turn as degrees of acceptability concerning the eventuality referred to in the speaker's utterance. She presents theoretical arguments and empirical evidence from Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages to show that speakers represent the past, present, and future as degrees of epistemic modality. She argues that temporality can be subsumed under the general label of acceptability or attitude and, rather like the semantic category of evidentiality, founded on the strength of evidence. In the approach she develops, modality provides basic conceptual building blocks for the concept of time and at the same time semantic building blocks for representing temporal expressions in her framework of Default Semantics. Dr. Jaszczolt sets the results of her research in the context of linguistic and philosophical work in semantics and pragmatics.

This volume of new work by prominent phonologists goes to the heart of current debates in phonological and linguistic theory: should the explanation of phonological variety be constraint or rule-based and, in the light of the resolution of this question, how in the mind does phonology interface with other components of the grammar. The book includes contributions from leading proponents of both sides of the argument and an extensive introduction setting out the history, nature, and more general linguistic implications of current phonological theory.

This book takes a fresh look at phonology in a range of real-world contexts that go beyond traditional concerns and challenge existing assumptions and practices. It brings together research and theory from first and second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, evolutionary linguistics, contact linguistics, clinical linguistics, cognitive psychology, literacy, and language teaching to suggest new directions for the field.

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and declension classes. They do so from the perspective of contemporary theories of morphology and phonology, including Distributed Morphology and Optimality Theory, and in the context of a wide range of languages, among them Amharic, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Saami, and Yiddish. The subjects addressed in the book include the role of featural decomposition of morphosyntactic features, the status of paradigms as the unit of syncretism, asymmetric effects in identity-dependence, and the selection of a base-of-derivation.
The Bases of Inflectional Identity will interest linguists and cognitive scientists, especially students and scholars of phonological theory and the phonology-morphology and mind-language interfaces at graduate level and above.

The sounds of language can be divided into consonants, vowels, and tones--the use of pitch to convey meaning. Seventy percent of the world's languages use pitch in this way. Assuming little or no prior knowledge of the topic, this textbook provides a clearly organized introduction to tone and tonal phonology. Comprehensive in scope, it examines the main types of tonal systems found in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, using examples from the widest- possible range of tone languages.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region.
Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic.
The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.

This is a new and revised edition of the title first published by OUP in 2000. From the reviews of the first edition: 'This book is a comprehensive study of the phonology of Standard Chinese. Not only is it rich in detailed and amazingly accurate factual description, it also proposes elegant theoretical solutions to many long-standing problems in Chinese phonology, such as word length variation, word order, and the application of the third tone sandhi. Another great strength of the book is that in every chapter, the generative literature on related issues is carefully reviewed. Therefore it can also serve as a great reference book for the past advances in Chinese generative phonology. Moreover, the book is written in a down-to-earth fashion and is very approachable by anyone with the slightest interest in Chinese languages or phonology but relatively little training in either area.' Jie Zhang, Linguist 'Because of its accessibility, this book can be used as an introductory textbook for Chinese phonology or Chinese linguistics.... Every phonologist and student of Chinese linguistics will find something valuable from the book because of its wealth of data and insightful analyses.' Yen-Hwei Lin, Phonology 'Explanations are based on a variety of perspectives, from traditional views of the phoneme to feature geometry and Optimality Theory, each concisely introduced so that the discussion easy to follow even for the novice. The result is a flowing, integrated approach that addresses - and solves - some of the thorniest perennial problems in Chinese phonology.... Because this user-friendly introduction offers innovative new solutions to old problems, it enjoys the rare distinction of succeeding both as an essential textbook of Standard Chinese phonology and as an important new theoretical advance in phonological analysis.' Edward J. Vajda, Language

This is a new and revised edition of the title first published by OUP in 2000. From the reviews of the first edition: 'This book is a comprehensive study of the phonology of Standard Chinese. Not only is it rich in detailed and amazingly accurate factual description, it also proposes elegant theoretical solutions to many long-standing problems in Chinese phonology, such as word length variation, word order, and the application of the third tone sandhi. Another great strength of the book is that in every chapter, the generative literature on related issues is carefully reviewed. Therefore it can also serve as a great reference book for the past advances in Chinese generative phonology. Moreover, the book is written in a down-to-earth fashion and is very approachable by anyone with the slightest interest in Chinese languages or phonology but relatively little training in either area.' Jie Zhang, Linguist 'Because of its accessibility, this book can be used as an introductory textbook for Chinese phonology or Chinese linguistics.... Every phonologist and student of Chinese linguistics will find something valuable from the book because of its wealth of data and insightful analyses.' Yen-Hwei Lin, Phonology 'Explanations are based on a variety of perspectives, from traditional views of the phoneme to feature geometry and Optimality Theory, each concisely introduced so that the discussion easy to follow even for the novice. The result is a flowing, integrated approach that addresses - and solves - some of the thorniest perennial problems in Chinese phonology.... Because this user-friendly introduction offers innovative new solutions to old problems, it enjoys the rare distinction of succeeding both as an essential textbook of Standard Chinese phonology and as an important new theoretical advance in phonological analysis.' Edward J. Vajda, Language

How did Shakespeare's plays sound when they were originally performed? How can we know, and could the original pronunciation ever be recreated? For three days in June 2004 Shakespeare's Globe presented their production of Romeo and Juliet in original, Shakespearian pronunciation. In an unusual blend of autobiography, narrative, and academic content, reflecting the unique nature of the experience, this 2005 book by David Crystal recounts the first attempt in over 50 years to mount a full-length Shakespeare play in original pronunciation. Crystal begins by discussing the Globe theatre's approach to 'original practices', which has dealt with all aspects of Elizabethan stagecraft - except pronunciation. A large section is devoted to the nature of the Early Modern English sound system. There are reports of how the actors coped with the task of learning the pronunciation, how it affected their performances and how the audiences reacted.

This wide-ranging survey of experimental methods in phonetics and phonology shows the insights and results provided by different methods of investigation, including laboratory-based, statistical, psycholinguistic, computational-modeling, corpus, and field techniques. The five chapters in the first part of the book examine the recent history and interrelations of theory and method. The remaining 18 chapters are organized into parts devoted to four key current areas of research: phonological universals; phonetic variation and phonological change; maintaining, enhancing, and modeling phonological contrasts; and phonological knowledge. The book provides fresh insights into the findings and theoretical advances that emerge from experimental investigation of phonological structure and phonological knowledge, as well as critical perspectives on experimental methods in the perception, production, and modeling of speech.
This book will be a valuable asset for all researchers into the sound structure of language, including scholars and advanced students of phonetics, phonology, speech science, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics.

This is the first comprehensive account of the segmental phonology of Hungarian in English. Part I introduces the general features of the language. Part II examines its vowel and consonant systems, and its phonotactics (syllable structure constraints, transsyllabic constraints, and morpheme structure constraints). Part III describes the phonological processes that vowels, consonants, and syllables undergo and/or trigger. The authors provide a new analysis of vowel harmony as well as discussions of vowel length alternations, palatalization, voice assimilation, and processes targeting nasals and liquids. The final chapters cover processes conditioned by syllable structure, and briefly describe a selection of surface phenomena.
This authoritative account of the sound pattern of this unique language will interest phonologists and advanced students throughout the world.

This book presents the first cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like "im-bloody-possible," and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: Professor Yu explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics, considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. He examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America. He compares the formal properties of different kinds of infix, explores the range of diachronic pathways that lead to them, and considers the processes by which they are acquired in first language learning. A central argument of the book concerns the idea that the typological tendencies of language may be traced back to its origins and to the mechanisms of language transmission. The book thus combines the history of infixation with an exploration of the role diachronic and functional factors play in synchronic argumentation: it is an exemplary instance of the holistic approach to linguistic explanation.
Alan Yu's pioneering study will interest phonologists and morphologists of all theoretical persuasions, as well as typologists and historical linguists.

It was not clear from early work in optimality theory how the theory could attack the rich range of phenomena now found in segmental alterations. However, there is now a body of work that concentrates on working out the details of featural phonology with OT, demonstrating that the theory allows superior explanations of the typological possibilities and the underlying motivations for these phenomena. This volume brings together current work by some of the influential researchers in this area, ranging from the authors of recent influential dissertations to prominent senior faculty.

Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change that produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account of the fact that many reductive sound changes affect high frequency items first.

A new contribution to linguistic theory, this book presents a formal framework for the analysis of word structure in human language. It sets forth the network of hypotheses constituting Paradigm Function Morphology, a theory of inflectional form. The book differs from other recent works on the same subject in that it treats inflectional morphology as an autonomous system of principles rather than as a subsystem of syntax or phonology and it draws on evidence from a diverse range of languages in motivating the proposed conception of word structure.

Turkisms in South Slavonic Literature is a comparative analysis of Turkish loanwords in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bosnian and Bulgarian Franciscan sources. The introduction gives historical information on the Order of the Bosnian Franciscans (Bosna Srebrena), Bulgarian Catholic communities, Turkish presence in Bosnia and in Bulgaria, as well as short biographies of each of the writers whose works are analysed. The second half of the introduction deals with language background: defining the local language, phonology, and orthography. Chapter two discusses the complications regarding the chronology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The third chapter looks at nominal morphology in Bosnian and Bulgarian. Among other things, this chapter analyses why turkisms borrowed from a language where gender is not a category developed the genders that they did. Chapter four addresses the verbal morphology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. It discusses aspect, Slavonic verbal prefixes, verbal roots, and Turkish voiced suffixes. The fifth chapter focuses on adjectives and adverbs: Turkish root adjectives and adverbs, derived adverbs and adjectives, and their agreement with the nouns that they modify are discussed. The sixth chapter addresses the use of Turkish conjunctions in in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The seventh chapter looks at the motivation, semantics, and context of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The conclusion addresses how the morphology, semantics, motivation, and context of turkisms relate to their chronology in Bosnian and Bulgarian, as well as how these points differ from language to language. It also provides suggestions for further study.