Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Phonetics & Phonology

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 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...

Phonetically reduced forms are plentiful, theoretically interesting, and a key challenge for automatic speech recognition systems. Yet canonical forms are still central to models of production and perception. Drawing from different fields and diverse languages, this volume brings new insights to the debate on abstractions and canonical forms in linguistics: their psychological reality, descriptive adequacy, and technical implementability.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to phonological theory and analysis, A Critical Introduction to Phonology introduces the key aspects of the discipline. Departing from the mainstream tradition, Daniel Silverman argues that the nature of linguistic sound systems can only be understood in the context of how they are used by speakers and listeners.

By proposing that linguistic sound systems are the product of an interaction among sound (acoustics), mind (cognition), and body (physiology), Silverman focuses on the functional consequences of their interaction. Now with each...

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to phonological theory and analysis, A Critical Introduction to Phonology introduces the key aspects of the discipline. Departing from the mainstream tradition, Daniel Silverman argues that the nature of linguistic sound systems can only be understood in the context of how they are used by speakers and listeners.

By proposing that linguistic sound systems are the product of an interaction among sound (acoustics), mind (cognition), and body (physiology), Silverman focuses on the functional consequences of their interaction. Now with each...

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...

Language teachers are often afraid to teach pronunciation because they lack essential, basic knowledge or training in phonetics and phonology. To correct this situation, this lively, interactive book links all three in a manner that allows future and current language teachers to translate research findings into classroom approaches. The authors focus on practical, pedagogical, and theoretical aspects of phonetics, phonology, and pronunciation. While many books in the area separate phonetics and phonology into different subject areas with limited practical application, and most treat...

In this book, some of today's leading neurolinguists and psycholinguists provide insight into the nature of phonological processing using behavioural measures, computational modeling, EEG and fMRI. The essays cover a range of topics including categorization, acoustic variability and invariance, underspecification, talker-specificity and machine learning, focusing on the acoustics, perception, acquisition and neural representation of speech.

This is an attempt to view historical phonological change as an ongoing, recurrent process. The author sees like events occurring at all periods, a phenomenon which he considers is disguised by too great a reliance upon certain characteristics of the scholarly tradition. Thus he argues that those innovations arrived at by speakers of the English language many years ago are not in principle unlike those that can be seen to be happening today. Phonological mutations are, on the whole, not to be regarded as unique, novel, once only events. Speakers appear to present to speech sound materials,...