Tom Limoncelli has passed on to me a query from a friend of his:

I have found myself running syllables together in unexpected ways:

instead of “hobo beans” I might say “hobob eans”

or instead of “Jon Bon Jovi” “Jon Bonge Ovi”

or instead of “soup and sandwich” “soups and which” (which is another set of problems, perhaps)

Do you or any linguists of your acquaintance know of this phenomenon?

It happens only orally, and not in writing.

The short answer is: metanalysis, a.k.a. recutting, though the third example seems to involve omission of and followed by recutting. But there’s more to be said here.

A number of different phenomena have been treated together under these headings. First, there are cases where an expression is recut morphologically: hamburger interpreted as ham + burger, leading to the creation of  nouns like cheeseburger and to a free-standing noun burger.

Then there are phonological recuttings, resyllabifications, both between words and within words. The major tendency here is to move segments from a less accented syllable to a more accented syllable, as in these between-word examples I noted on ADS-L back in 2003:

final /s/ in this and las’ (for last) moved into the second word in some two-word time expressions, as in this morning, this evening and last night;

public radio announcer Bob Edwards pronouncing his name with the final /b/ of Bob moved to the beginning of Edwards;

public radio announcer Sandip Roy pronouncing his name with the final /p/ of Sandip moved to the beginning of Roy;

an ad for the movie Mystic River in which the final /k/ of Mystic is moved to the beginning of River.

The Bedwards, Proy, and Criver productions were particularly easy to detect, because of the allophonics involved: Bob Edwards tends to have ingressive variants for syllable-initial (but not syllable-final) /b/; and /p/ and /k/ have aspirated variants at the beginning of accented syllables (but not at the end of syllables) position.

(The resyllabifications that Limoncelli’s friend reported would not be so easy to hear, and at least two of them move a consonant from a more accented to a less accented syllable, so I’m a bit suspicious of the report.)

These resyllabifications take place in expressions that are familiar to the speaker (if only by repetition, as in the Misty Criver case) and are likely to be treated as phonological words.

The familiarity effect shows up within words as well. As Dennis Preston claimed in ADS-L, resyllabification is “how you can identify real cheeseheads: Us wis-con-sin, Them wi-scon-sin”. Again, the difference is easy to hear, because We have an aspirated variant of the /k/, while They have an unaspirated variant.

The resyllabifications I’ve looked at so far are phonetic readjustments. But sometimes they can be lexicalized; that is, they can result in changes in the phonological content of lexical items.

Consider the English indefinite article, which has two shapes, a and an, the choice between them depending on the following phonological context, and which also forms a prosodic unit with the following material. As a result, it can be unclear whether an /n/ belongs to the article or to a following noun, and English has seen phonological re-shapings of a number of nouns, going in both directions: apron has lost an initial n, while newt has picked one up.

(Some writers use the term metanalysis to refer only to historical changes.)

Tomorrow we will have a student session of TiL featuring our own Brad Hoot (UIC Ph.D. student) and visiting student Álvaro Recio (University of Salamanca Ph.D. student).  Brad Hoot will present “An Optimality Theoretic Analysis of Focus in Spanish and English”.  His presentation will be conducted in English.  Álvaro Recio will present “Las propiedades argumentales de los complementos del nombre en español” (see abstract below), and his presentation will be given in Spanish.

As always the talk will be at 3 in 1750 University Hall with light refreshments provided.

Álvaro Recio (University of Salamanca)                    UIC TiL Fall 2009

Abstract
Las propiedades argumentales de los complementos del nombre en español

 Son muchos los autores que en las últimas décadas han puesto de relieve el paralelismo existente entre la estructura interna del sintagma nominal y del sintagma verbal. No todos los modificadores realizan la misma aportación al significado de un sintagma, ni tienen idénticas propiedades formales ni gozan del mismo estatuto sintáctico. De la misma manera que el verbo posee una red argumental que le permite seleccionar determinado tipo de complementos, ciertos sustantivos, bien por herencia deverbal, bien por su propia semántica interna, seleccionan igualmente complementos argumentales. En consecuencia, en el interior de los grupos nominales, de forma paralela a las oraciones, también es preciso distinguir entre argumentos y adjuntos. Si bien en otras lenguas, fundamentalmente inglés, italiano y francés, se han dedicado  numerosos estudios al respecto, en el ámbito hispánico apenas se han esbozado unas pautas generales de clasificación de estos complementos, por lo que se revela necesario un análisis exhaustivo y profundo aplicado al español.

 El objetivo de esta charla es presentar las características generales de un proyecto que trata de ahondar en la estructura interna del sintagma nominal en castellano, en los llamados complementos argumentales del sustantivo. Para ello, se expondrán los rasgos fundamentales que permiten determinar qué clases de sustantivos pueden seleccionar argumentos en español, cuál es la estructura de estos y qué tipo de vínculo los enlaza con el núcleo nominal, pues parece que no todos los argumentos tienen el mismo peso dentro del sintagma: el de mayor relieve temático podría ser considerado el “sujeto” del sintagma nominal.

 Especial atención se dedicará a las subordinadas sustantivas que se vinculan a un nombre a través de una preposición (por ejemplo, la idea de comprar un coche o el problema de que los alumnos no estudien), ya que muchos aspectos de su funcionamiento están todavía desatendidos. Una rigurosa descripción de los modificadores del sustantivo no puede ignorar este tipo de construcciones y requiere analizar las características de los núcleos que las aceptan, el carácter argumental o no de la oración, así como la elección del modo correspondiente en el verbo subordinado.

Firthian Prosdic Analysis provides a way of thinking about language and phonology which is fundamentally different from approaches in the ‘American’ and/or generative tradition.

As Anderson’s overview points out, “While one might be tempted to compare the phonematic units of the former with the phonemes of the latter [ie phonemicist analyses], for example, this would be a clear mistake. Both are essentially segment-sized units, it is true, and form systems of paradigmatic contrasts, but the similarities end there” (Anderson, 1985: 189).

The extremely helpful (clear and informative) JL article by Ogden and Local (1994) makes the same point very forcefully – it is thoroughly misguided to use the concepts and categories of generative approaches as a way of understanding Firthian ones, as though the differences between the analyses were simply terminological, or as if Firth was merely fumbling, in isolation from the American mainstream and in a quaintly eccentric English gentlemanly way, towards the same understanding as SPE-style analyses ended up with.

“Phonological units are, according to FPA, in syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations with each other. Syntagmatic relations are expressed as prosodies. Prosodies can also be in paradigmatic relations; this is what it means to be ‘in system’. Thus one can talk equally well of a ‘prosodic system’ and a ‘phonematic system’ (such as ‘C-system’ or a ‘V-system’). Both prosodies and phonematic units must also be stated in relation to ’structure’ which in turn expresses syntagmatic relations” (Ogden & Local, 1994: 480).

“In making a Firthian Prosodic statement, the analyst typically begins by paying attention to the syntagmatic ‘piece’ and stating the prosodies relevant to the description of the piece under analysis; but the information is explicitly not thereby ‘removed’ or ‘abstracted away’, and the phonematic units are not ‘what is left’: in particular, phonematic units are not ’sounds’ (Goldsmith 1992: 153), since phonological representations according to FPA  are not pronounceable; nor are they merely the ‘lowest’ points on which all else hangs, like the skeletal tier. Phonematic and prosodic units serve to express relationships: prosodies express syntagmatic relations, phonematic units paradigmatic relations. All else that can be said about them depends on this most basic understanding” (Ogden & Local, 1994: 481).

It may possibly be worth adding that when Anderson speaks of phonematic units being ’segment-sized’, this likely needs to be qualified by saying that in a Firthian-inspired approach, establishing the size of a segment is actually part of the analysis – segments and phonemes are emphatically not equivalent – a syllable or a foot could equally well be a “segment” in a Firthian analysis, if descriptive or analytical adequacy called for these units to be the terms in the paradigm. Hear Lodge:

“there is nothing that tells us a priori that paradigmatic relations that establish the meaningful contrasts of a language have to be between segment-sized entities at the phonological level any more than at any other level. In syntax, for example, a ‘segment’ is usually word-length, and certainly morpheme-length; the ‘segment’ is the smallest bit of the speech chain suitable for describing the patterns of a particular level. We segment speech in different ways for different purposes. Such segments include syllable places: onset, rhyme, nucleus and coda, the foot, the intonation group, the morpheme, and so on” (Lodge, 2007: 80).

__________________

(Post inspired by the surprising discovery that “phonematic units” is a search term that leads to this blog.)

(Also in the back of my mind being the Friendly Humanist’s talk about silos – phonologically speaking, the Ogden & Lodge article is superb for such a purpose, not that I would particularly claim to be anything more than firth-sympathetic.)

Anderson, SR (1985). Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lodge, K (1997). ‘Timing, segmental status and aspiration in Icelandic.’  Transactions of the Philological Society 105: 66-104

Ogden, R & Local, JK (1994). ‘Disentangling autosegments from prosodies: a note on the misrepresentation of a research tradition in phonology.’ Journal of Linguistics 30: 477-498

In the newest edition of the journal, Current Biology, an interesting article was published about the language in which babies cry.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VRT-4XMC7T8-2&_user=186797&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000013678&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=186797&md5=e63728d15e7564930d593e35a85847eb

Apparently infants have already begun acquiring phonology at such an early stage that long before they can speak, they already cry in their native language.  In fact, the authors suggest that fetuses can ”memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language.”  It is not surprising then that their first sounds be somewhat language-specific.  French infants, for example, were found to prefer rising intonations in their cries and German infants preferred falling tones.  Further, the suggested effect is that “adult-like processing of pitch intervals allows newborns to appreciate musical melodies and emotional and linguistic prosody.”

“Newborns’ cry melody is shaped by their native language”. Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe, Kathleen Wermke. Current Biology 2009, Nov 5, doi 10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064

Other publications have begun taking notice as well.  The University of Würzburg has a discussion of the implications in German:
http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/sonstiges/meldungen/single/artikel/sprache-be/

and English:
http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/sonstiges/meldungen/detail/artikel/sprache-be/

And Uruguay’s LR21 has posted an article in Spanish:
http://www.larepublica.com.uy/comunidad/388084-afirman-que-los-bebes-lloran-en-el-mismo-idioma-de-su-madre

In a prior study (Newman & Bernstein Ratner, 2007), we examined the effects of word frequency and phonological neighborhood characteristics on confrontation naming latency, accuracy and fluency in adults who stutter and typically-fluent speakers. A small difference in accuracy favoring fluent adults was noted, but no other patterns differentiated fluent speaker responses from those obtained from the adults who stutter. Because lexical organization or retrieval differences might be more easily observed in less mature language users, we replicated the experiment using 15 children who stutter (ages 4;10 16;2) and age-and gender-matched peers. Results replicated the earlier study: the two groups of participants showed strikingly similar patterns of responses based on word frequency and neighborhood characteristics. There were also no differences in naming accuracy overall between the two groups. Given our results and those of other researchers who have explored the impact of neighborhood variables on lexical retrieval in people who stutter, we suggest that differences between language production in PWS and fluent speakers are not likely to involve atypical phonological organization of lexical neighborhoods.

from Journal of Fluency Disorders

Chris Waigl sends on the cartoon below, displayed in Silver Gulch (“America’s northernmost brewery”) in Fox, Alaska:

For Chris, lager and logger are a minimal pair (with an unrounded vowel in the first syllable of the first, a rounded vowel in the second); for me, they are homophones (with an unrounded vowel in both), which blunts the effect of the joke.

The history and dialectology of low back vowels in English is extraordinarily complex; the Wikipedia entry on the phonological history of the English has a detailed account of the situation, taken from scholarly sources.

With respect to the low back vowels, Chris’s variety of English approximates British RP (“Received Pronunciation”), where there are three phonemically distinct vowels in this phonetic space:

an unrounded long vowel (in father and cart);

a rounded long vowel (in law and caught);

a rounded short vowel (in bother and cot).

My system in this domain is a subtype of GA (“General American”), which has two phonemically distinct vowels:

an unrounded long vowel (in father, bother, and cot; my variety is rhotic, so cart is not directly relevant here);

a rounded long vowel (in law and caught).

Note that I don’t generally have the cot/caught merger that is fairly widespread in American English (usually in favor of an unrounded vowel), but like many GA speakers, I have the merger in some words. As it happens, log is one of them; I have a rounded vowel in dog, but an unrounded vowel in log and also logger (and for some words I have alternative pronunciations), though many GA speakers have a rounded vowel in all three words.

So logger and lager end up being homophones for me (but a minimal pair for Chris Waigl).

(Note: normally I allow comments on this blog, but I’m closing them for this posting, because my experience is that the topic provokes a cascade of unproductive comments about people’s pronunciations of specific words. It’s well known that there are a great many varieties and sub-varieties of English in the domain of low back vowels; that there’s also variation in the treatment of specific words; and that all this variation is associated — but not rigidly — with geography, social class, age, and other non-linguistic factors. Information from particular people about particular words doesn’t advance our knowledge, entertaining though it may be to exchange anecdotes about the way we talk.)

I used much of my time this week (9.24.20009) reading, pondering, researching, and studying many ideas in the fields of Orality, Literacy, Primary Oral Cultures vs. Primarily Writing Cultures, and Characteristics of each or either.

Here some results of my reading accomplished for Literacy, Rhetoric, and Technology, RWS 511, Fall 2009, SDSU, taught by Professor Werry.

The first, reading included all of Chapter 6, “Discourse and Medium”, in the 2nd edition of Barbara Johnstone’s pedagogical text, Discourse Analysis; published in 2008 by Blackwell. I also read the article, “The Lost World of Colonial Handwriting” by Tamara Plakins Thornton. This can be found in Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. edited by Cushman et al. for Bedford St Martins press in 2001. See my separate blog herein on this article.

Barbara Johnstone,a Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, PA., has produced an expansive body of published work. She is a major contributor to the areas of sociolinguistics, linguistics, discourse structures, and rhetoric through the late 20th century into this 21st century.

This sixth chapter of her textbook, Discourse Analysis reaches into the symbiotic relationship between discourse and its medium. She steadily unfolds and untwists the tangled mix of causes, affects, perspectives, technologies, multi-modal discourse, and misconceptions historical and cultural. Her writing is clear and word choice simple. Once presented, many of her explanations of discourse and medium’s influence over each other seem obvious. Yet,  I (and I venture most amateur rhetoricians) would have great trouble unraveling these knots on my own. Some examples of these elements form the first page (195) are: “Starting or ending a conversation via the telephone is different from starting or ending a conversation with someone who can be seen.” And, most of us are quite aware of metamessages through font styles, colors, and size in our email discourses.

Check out more work by Barbara Johnstone at <http://works.bepress.com/barbara_johnstone/>

In the following outline form I will give my general impression of this chapter; section IA.  I provide an overview of major sections and the claims presented by Dr. Johnstone or those which she discusses in IB. Other great resources for investigating the Homeric Question are listed in IC. Finally, in ID, I have a short list of other important texts which will aid an investigation of thought about Orality, Literacy and Writing.

IA. About Dr. Barbara Johnstone:

Anyone interested in areas of Sociolinguistics, Linguistics, Philosophy of Literacy and Linguistics, Rhetoric and Writing, and development processes of cultures, brain function, and psychology must read more of Dr Barbara Johnstone’s work. Here’s a good place to start: <http://works.bepress.com/barbara_johnstone/>.

Interestingly, it was circa1960’s when realizations of major differences between oral cultures and written cultures surfaced across several fields of Western scholarly research. We are told that this insight was sparked by a scholar of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Milman Parry (1902 – 1935). He is noted to have found an answer to the enduring Homeric Question, “Who really wrote these ancient epics?” Though long attributed to Homer, Parry resolved that these epics were originally oral stories passed along for many generations by a primary oral people. Parry took these recitations of history, heroes, battles, and morals and demonstrated similarities to other epic poems and songs which were from known primary oral traditions. (ibid 198-199)

An Aside: I am confused about the dates when Parry’s announced his conclusions to the scholarly world. Dr Johnstone’s brief section, “Early work on ‘Orality and Literacy’”,in chapter six, states that Parry’s son published all of his work in 1971. (ibid 198) I assume that this theory was shared with the scholastic community during his lifetime, because “Erik Havelock (1982 [1963])” is noted to have claimed that “literature does not have the same function in an oral tradition, said Havelock, as in a literate one.” These epic tales functioned as entertainment and history lessons, he said. Verbal formulas for characters and situations are a common characteristic of an oral literacy. (ibid 199)

This chapter, Discourse and Medium, presents a deep river from which flow many tributaries bringing life to theories, questions, and fertile research areas. One such direction of inquiry comes up against the idea that “orality” (oral communication without any recourse to written language) was in opposition to “literacy”, and washed those prejudgments away.  “Historians woke up to “orality” in the 1980’s, for example, after reading Walter Ong’s publications…” Ong’s conclusions cite several ways that knowledge is transmitted in an oral lifeworld that is quite different in written lifeworlds. To contrast and compare elements of oral and written cultures, Ong devised an arrangement of these into structures, themes, and function. (ibid 199)

Perhaps as a result of her well mapped paths, many of the statements about discourse and the medium or modality discourse appeared on the face as rather obvious conclusions. Yet, I (and, I venture to say, most amateur rhetoriticians) would have great trouble if we were left on our own to navigate a satisfactory route to see and clearly state these same ideas. For example: “[S]tarting or ending a conversation via the telephone is different from starting or ending a conversation with someone who can be seen.” (ibid 195) Also, we are quite aware of the way that choices of font styles, colors, and size convey different visual messages.  However, the strikingly difficult thing for most of us to understand is the consciousness of those who communicate (are literate) in cultures devoid of any technologies for writing, remembering, analyzing, computing, and sharing experiences. Ah-hah. How can we of writing cultures ever know if we are understanding people from primary oral cultures? (ibid 198)

IB. Chapter six: Discourse and Medium:

INTRODUCTION:

Claim: “Discourse is shaped by its medium.” (ibid 195)

Discourse and its medium of transmittal

<> starting or ending correspondence, grammar, punctuation, assertions, expressions, emotions,

<> Who are the parties involved, the interlocutors? What formalities, time-constraints, etc?

Medium/modalities and community factors and discourse

<> ham radio operators, face book, young, old, social status, gender

Discourse, New Modalities and their forms

CLAIM: “people develop new ways of using language in the process of communicating in new media… sometimes tied to constraints and possibilities afforded by the media…” (ibid 196)

<> How are metamessages affected by variations of modality?

<> Is medium changed by discourse?

CLAIM: “new ideas about language… come to be associated with new ways of communicating.” (ibid 196)

Is all technology used the same by everyone?

Look at attributes of power and gender in re politics of authorship, text, and readership.

Early Work on “Orality and Literacy”

CLAIM: “…detached, retrospective thought about language that makes grammatical and rhetorical analysis feasible is really only possible in the context of writing.” (ibid 197)

<> Changes between spoken and written language; 1^st: writing represents speech

<> Perform a detached and retrospective analysis of elements of any language in written format

CLAIM: “the entire endeavor of discourse analysis depends on thinking of oral discourse as if it were written.” (ibid 197)

<> 1960’s Sociolinguists revealed surprising differences of spoken discourse to written

<>Homeric Question – “who wrote the Iliad and he Odyssey? (ibid 198)

<> 19^th C scholars said I & O unlike any Greek texts, or literary works; I & O not like each other.

Milman Parry found all which distinguishes I & O from other contemporary written work was the result of oral composition: stock characters, pre-established scenarios, traditional phrases or formulas

Formulas fit standard themes (challenge to duels, gathering of armies)

Formulas attached to key characters, standard physical referents. i.e. “rosy-fingered dawn

Erik Havelock: why want to listen to same formula cliches?

Oral culture has different connection to the repetitious stories: history, lineage…

Havelock Claim: “Literature does not have the same function in as oral tradition… as in a literate one.” (ibid 199)

Walter J. Ong – general theorist about determining orally vs written transmission of information: (See the chart: Johnston 200)

1. structure – context: repetition, balance, & rhythm; simple syntax, additive (not subtractive) “there’s a bump on the log…”

2. themes – heroic characters, agonistic /diametrically opposed, knowledge close to human world, concrete; explanations

3. functions – words = events no lasting trace, powerful and magical. idea & memorable utterance stays connected. Conservative;

{U-Tube™ the poetry and music genre of Umm Kulthum};

Oral to written language changed Greeks immensely. They moved toward having a history away from having myth.

Hypothesis/Claim: “the way to democracy and equality in a society, may in fact lead to social stratification, as distinctions come to be made based on what and how much people read.” (Johnson quoting Goody and Watt, 200)

Literacy and Literacies

CLAIM: “…medium affects, and is affected by, what people do with discourse.” (ibid 201)

CLAIM: “What writing and reading are used for and how they affect people’s lives and ways of thinking depends on how writing and reading are conceived of in local terms.” (ibid 200)

<> Educational processes, technologies of writing, purposes, psychological, cultural, ideological concepts of how writing and orality will interact (Johnson 200-201)

CLAIM: “…literacy does not always involve the same activities and that its consequences are not always the same.” How reading and writing are used and how people respond to these is affected by their local conceptions of the action or presence of writing and reading. (ibid 202)

Dialect: ways of speaking that do not have a specific writing system. Sociolinguists say not so… i.e. Louisiana French… (ibid 204-206)

<> For Middle Ages Europeans writing was only seen as good for dictation, it took years before writing was an activity in its own right; not having to be spoken first. Soon writing became more authoritative… but not the Nukulaelae… where oral messages were thought to be much more reliable. (ibid 204)

Communication and Technology

CLAIM: “All discourse is mediated.” and “… material objects of all sorts serve as carriers of meaning…” (ibid 208)

CLAIM: All medium used are affected by beliefs, ideology. Even technologies available everywhere are not used the same ways or for the same purposes. (ibid 207)

Dimensions along which medium might influence discourse”:

1.  syntactic complexity, number of words, cohesiveness, different, macrostructure: less or more;

2.  these processes may be related: easier to recall information in one medium over another -

3. discourse medium and interpersonal relations may be related.

4. medium may be involved with knowledge-making and knowledge use

<> Planning and Discourse Structure

>>  more or less planning face-to-face vs written; drafts, edits, rehearsed, recorded

>> unplanned: immediate context (not syntax); (ibid 211)

>> propositions tend to be semantically linked via parataxis;

>> rely of syntactic strategies and structures learned in early life

>> repetition and additive processes- repeat and add another word for definition or clarity

>> phonology – other picks up sounds of speaker and repeat

charts: BIBER (1988) id-ed 67 features (ibid 214)

TANNEN (1982)  looks at persuasion, abstract & non-abstract. (ibid 213)

<> Fixity, Fluidity, and Coherence: physical /cultural conventions / incoherence

CLAIM: Fixed discourse is relatively fixed in form. (ibid 216)

>> Coherence differs between print and hypertext; e-conversations more chance for interruptions

CLAIM: People using new medium for discourse may (1) fall back on expectations and strategies learned in human-to-human interactions; and (2) overtime develop new strategies which adapt to kinds of discourse practices facilitated by the particular medium and their (local community’s) ideas about the usage thereof. (ibid 218-219)

<> Medium and Interpersonal Relations: Print / hypertext / caller i.d.

CLAIM: “…electronic media [may] liberate interlocutors from some of the stereotyping and discrimination that can occur in face-to-face talk” (ibid 223)

>> some people try to recreate face-to-face involvement (ibid 221)

>> some people orient to the medium over the audience…become willing to divulge sensitive    personal information; and it is also claimed that computer-mediated communication can be more “depersonalized”. (ibid 222)

>> gender differences & other based forms of communication retained

<> Analyzing Multimodal Discourse

Kress and Van Leeuwen suggest strata of 4 interrelated sources of resources and constraints: discourse, design, production, and distribution.

CLAIM: “…the interactive qualities of how form and meaning are produced mean that no particular speaker or hearer is ever the sole creator of discourse.” “…we live in a world where discourse, design and production no longer form a unity.” (ibid 227)

IC. The Homeric Question

Take the challenge offered by Felice Vinci in his, “The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth”. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2006. Library of Congress, ISBN 1-59477-052-2 (pbk)

How should historians and “known” history” be affected by these vital discussions about characteristics of primary oral cultures and those of written cultures? A phrase attributed to Walter J. Ong in discussing oral culture traits is, “One only knows what one knows.” In writing cultures many people believe and therefore “know” only what they read, some people only trust what they hear. In both situations human beings are susceptible to relying on false information. The many questions, postulates and contradictions in re the Homeric Question are, as well, historic unknowns, and yet, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the earliest known poems of the Western literature. Vinci’s theory about these epics follows a well respected path of re-discovering history. First published in Italian in 1995 under the title, Omero nel Baltico, The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales, follows the eye-opening works of Moses Finley, Heinrich Schliemann, Stuart Piggott, Charles Dumézil, Karl Kerényi and Martin P. Nilsson.

Felice Vinci’s claim is that “[t]he origin of the poem of Achilles, the Iliad, seems to be the regions of the Gulf of Finland, whereas the first nucleus of the poem glorifying Ulysses, the Odyssey, likely originated in the area of what is now Denmark,” (Joscelyn Godwin, in the forward of Vinci’s book, X-XI)

ID. More Reading for Widening the Understanding of Orality, Literacy and Writing

Faderman, Lillian, Ed. Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: VIking. 1994.

Feintuch, Burt, Ed.” Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture: Group, Art, Text, Genre, Performance, Context, Tradition, Identity”. Board of Trustees of Illinois University, 2003, 70-77.

Hall, Edith. “Chapter 4, Telling Tales”. From, The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008. Here find helpful insight about stories, truths, elements of fiction writing, etc.

weiss, ruth. Any of her work or especially performance records of this “goddess of the Beat Generation” is amazing. She considers her voice one of the jazz instruments, and the words she speaks create texture, rhythm, depth, melody, and vi-bra-tion, The words she speaks are vibrations of who hears them… “Google her”.

There are 5 vowels and 15 consonants. English consonants such as ‘j’, ‘f’, ‘v’ and ‘z’ are sometimes used for loan words.

As with English, these vowels are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’. Colloquially, ‘e’ and ‘i’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ are most often interchanged. Formally, ‘e’ is used only in loan words or proper names. ‘o’ normally occurs in final syllables, as in tu-on [to learn].

Consonants are classified as follows:

• b, p – bilabial
• d, t – alveolar
• l – alveolar (lateral)
• r – alveolar (flap)
• g, k – velar
• h – voiceless glottal fricative
• m - nasal (bilabial)
• n - nasal (alveolar)
• ng – nasal (velar)
• s – voiceless alveolar fricative
• w, y – consonantal vocoid

Special Characters

• ts – pronounced as ‘ch’ as in chinese
• ui – pronounced as the vowel ‘i’

Similar to Filipino, accents play an important role in distinguishing words with identical spelling. With open sylllables – syllables that end with a vowel – an accent is a combination of stress and length. To illustrate,‘a:mo [(ah'mo) master, employer], the stress is on the 1st syllable; while am’o: [(ahmoh') monkey], the stress is on the final syllable and ‘o’ is a long vowel.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I will use the following notations to denote accents:

1. ` as in payat` [thin] – stress is on the final syllable
2. ‘ as in laba’ [long (in length)] – glottal stop on ‘a’, implicitly, stress is on the 1st syllable
3. ^ as in nubo^ [short (in length)] – stress is on the final syllable, glottal stop on ‘o’

Each syllable is pronounced clearly in this language. For hyphenated words such as ta-as [tall] and bug-at [heavy], the 2nd syllable begins with a glottal stop.

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of pitch-contour variation. In English, pitch contour does not differentiate words, but serves other functions, like marking yes/no questions and conveying emotions. We show that, in accordance with their phonology, English-speaking adults and 2-year-olds do not interpret salient pitch contours as inherent to novel words. We taught participants a new word with consistent segmental and pitch characteristics, and then tested word recognition for trained and deviant pronunciations using an eyegaze-based procedure. Vowel-quality mispronunciations impaired recognition, but large changes in pitch contour did not. By age 2, children already apply their knowledge of English phonology to interpret phonetic consistencies in their experience with words.

from the Journal of Memory and Language

There is a word. It is a good word, with strong, Old English origins. The word means ‘scarcity’, and is spelled D-E-A-R-T-H. Being a person whose reading far exceeds her experience of audible vocabulary, I chose the pronunciation of this word. Despite associations with the Dark Side in Star Wars, I opted for the sound that rhymes with hearth. Then one day some friends heard me say dearth and decided I needed to learn that the pronunciation actually rhymes with earth.

And I still don’t like it. Earth is such a full, substantial word, like a foundational grunt. A word meaning ‘famine’ ought to have a hollow, agonizing emptiness, where echoes live. Dearth should have a sound reminiscent of starving, and less like ‘birth’.

To God be all glory,

Lisa of Longbourn

2010610 ระบบเสียงภาษาอังกฤษ English Phonology

ระบบเสียงของวิธภาษาอังกฤษหลักๆ ได้แก่ อังกฤษ อเมริกัน และ ออสเตรเลียน ประเด็นทางระบบเสียงภาษาอังกฤษ เน้นเรื่องเสียงซ้อน ระบบการถ่ายทอดเสียงแบบต่างๆ การฝึกปฏิบัติ

(The phonological system of the main varieties: British, American, and Australian English; issues in English phonology emphasizing suprasegmentals; different systems of transcription; practicum.)

(2010610 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

Somebody reached this blog by searching for, “Is the word “just” a stressed syllable?”

No doubt they’re long gone, but what a question!

Stress is inherently relational: you can only identify something as stressed in comparison to something else.

When a word is monosyllabic, there is no question about where its lexical stress is located: on the only syllable there is. So in citation form, I suppose there could just about be a sense in which you could call it a stressed syllable. It’s stressed enough, I suppose, to make it utterable.

But considering citation forms isn’t the best way of going about any phonological analysis. You need to see (for which read: hear) the word in context, so that it can be considered in its relation to the surrounding words. Only then is it possible to decide whether it is stressed (in relation to the surrounding words) or not.

Syntagmatics is the way forward, folks.

Britney uses an umbrella to attack Kevin Federline's car. The attack, coupled with her freshly-shaven head, confirmed our suspicions that, although she claims to be from Lousiana, she actually came to Earth from a universe far, far away.

Alright Grammateers, it’s time to venture once more into the oftentimes utterly confusing world of grammar. After a brief respite, (I decided that I would forgo blogging last night in favor of maintaining my social life) I am back and raring to go.

Today’s blog is in response to a question proffered by Max.

On October 8, 2009, Max asked, “Why is ‘an’ used before all words that begin with a vowel except for U (I.e. a universe)?”

Great question Max!

As a boring starting point, a and an are what we call indefinite articles.

To answer Max’s question, we’re going to have to think about words the way they sound, independently of their spelling.  To do this, it will be very helpful for you to go into a private room where you can comfortably murmur to yourself in a repetitive fashion.  After you’ve securely buckled your straight jacket, say (out loud) the word, universe. Say it five more times, with particular emphasis on the first syllable.  Then, say the word YouTube, five times to yourself, again, with particular emphasis on the first syllable.

Did you catch that these words have the same first syllable? If you did, you can unbuckle your straight-jacket.  If you didn’t, we’re gonna have to transfer you to the psychiatric ward where you can continue your mumbling under close supervision.

The key point to recognize is that universe begins with a y sound.  If we were to spell this word out phonetically, it would look something like YOO-ni-vers.  So, although the word begins with a u, the first noise we make when we go to say it is the consonant, y. It is for this reason that we treat it like most words that begin with y and use the article a, instead of an, when modifying it.

Say the following sentences, out loud:

A unicorn once said, “There has to be a universe other than ours out there! To find it, I will to go a university and study astronomy.”

All three of these words begin with the YOO sound, and thus, we use the article, a, rather than an, to modify them.

But Max, we don’t use the indefinite article, a, to modify all words that begin with a u! Take, for example the following set of words.

Umbrella

Ulcer

Umpire

If you say these words out loud, you will notice that they do not begin with the YOO noise (although YOOmbrella would be a cool word). Instead, they begin with the “Uh” noise.  The “Uh” Noise doesn’t begin with a vowel like the YOO noise, therefore we use the indefinite article, an, when modifying words that begin with this noise—just like most words that begin with a vowel.

To learn this, say the following sentences out loud:

The coach grabbed an umbrella before trying to find an umpire for the game. His wife called from kitchen, “Take your medicine before you leave, Jerry! You’re gonna give yourself an ulcer!”

There are other tricky instances of indefinite article usage.  The key to figuring out whether to use a or an is to forget spelling and focus on pronunciation.

For instance, we say an hour, but a hillbilly. Hour is treated like a word beginning with a vowel because it begins with a vowel noise.  Just think, it sounds just like the word our, which begins with a vowel, so it makes sense.

Here’s an example sentence for you to say aloud:

The Constable muttered, “Although it is an honor that you wish to have me stay for dinner, I only have an hour to make it home before dark.”

Another thing to remember is that we use an with some acronyms, or more accurately, initialisms, that begin with consonants.

Say these common initialisms to yourself:

FBI

NBA

SOB

LOL

Although these initialisms begin with the consonants, each of them begins with a vowel sound.  I’ve spelled them out phonetically below.

EFF-BEE-AI

EN-BEE- AY

ES-OW-BEE

ELL-OW-ELL

Well Grammateers, that’s all I’ve got for today.  I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s mission, and remember, if you forget anything you learned today, (as you probably will) it’s no biggie.  You can always google it later.

Do you think I’m totally wrong? Do you know I’m totally wrong? Do you want to air your frustrations to a faceless grammar geek? Feel free to leave a comment below.  Of course, any positive feedback would also be appreciated, even if it’s just out of pity.

**Please no ridiculously obscene stuff. (e.g. racial slurs, requests for sex, spam, etc )  I live in Georgia and see enough of that daily.  Thanks!

Homophone interference effects in Stroop experiments are often taken as evidence for the hypothesis that semantic access in written Chinese language is mediated by activation of phonological processing. We here aim to test this hypothesis with Chinese single-character words by means of event related potential (ERP) recordings. Using color words, homophones of color words and color-word associates as materials in a Stroop task, we found behavioral Stroop interference effects for all stimulus types and an N450 for incongruent color words and color-word associates. Critically, there was no difference in the ERPs elicited by congruent and incongruent homophones in the N450 time window. However, in a later time window (600-800 ms) the incongruent homophones elicited an apparent positivity over left posterior regions. A similar effect was also observed for incongruent color words. These findings thus indicate that phonology does not play an important role in semantic activation of Chinese single-character words, and that the behavioral Stroop effects for homophones possibly arises at later stage of lexical processing.

from Neuroscience

We’re starting a new series of posts about bilingualism labs around the world.  Our very first lab is the ESRC Centre at Bangor University.

The ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice (http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/)  was established at Bangor on 1st January 2007 for an initial five-year period, with funding from the ESRC, HEFCW, and the Welsh Assembly Government.

It is the first research centre in the UK to focus specifically on bilingualism. As such it will be part of an international network of similar research centres with whom we would like to interact.

Research within the centre is centred around five research groups: Neuroscience Research Group , Experimental-Developmental Research Group, Corpus-Based Research Group, Survey and Ethnography Research Group, Speech Research Group. There is more information on the work of each of these groups in the following link:

http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/research/index.php.en?menu=3&catid=6337&subid=0

The centre offers both an MA and a PhD in Bilingualism. For more information on our postgraduate programmes go to:

http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/pgprogrammes/index.php.en?menu=11&catid=6554&subid=0

Whether you are a researcher or a practitioner interested in bilingualism, we hope that you will interact with us by visiting, writing, phoning, or attending one of our conferences and workshops. This weekend past (Oct. 2^nd-3^rd), the centre hosted the first Bangor Postgraduate Conference on Bilingualism and Bimodalism. It is aimed at Masters’ and doctoral level students to come together, present their work and come in contact with new ideas. The main goal of the conference is to establish a forum for postgraduate students interested in all linguistic aspects of Bilingualism and Bimodalism. The area of bilingualism being by definition interdisciplinary, the conference reunites contributions from numerous fields, ranging from linguistics to psychology, education and sociology. English-BSL interpreters will be provided for the duration of the conference to enable Deaf and hearing participants to fully engage in all conference activities. The invited speakers are: Marianne Gullberg (Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), Ineke Mennen (ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice, Bangor University), and Adam Schembri (Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL), Univeristy College London). To see the full conference program, please go to:

 http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/conferencepg_programme.php.en

At the moment the centre has two calls for funding opportunities: the development fund  (http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk//devfund/index.php.en?catid=&subid=7211) and the visiting researcher programme http://bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk//research/VisitingResearchers.php.en?catid=&subid=7237).

If you are interested in bilingualism and in working with us, you can always apply for research associate status. Forms can be found on our website!

Words, roughly speaking, in the psycholinguistic sense of ‘items in the mental lexicon’, consist of a phonological form coupled with semantic content. They mean something, and they have a sound structure, and these two properties can theoretically be analysed and discussed independently of each other. To give a phonological description of a particular word, for example, you would want to discuss what kind of consonants and vowels it was composed of, how many syllables, the structure of the syllables, the stress pattern, and so on; what the word actually means in the language can be treated as a separate question altogether.

You can also manipulate certain characteristics of the phonological properties of the words of a given language. You could, for example, observe that English allows the sequence “pr” at the start of words (prince, press) and “nd” at the end of words (wind, sand), and so construct the sequence “prend”. It sounds a bit like “friend”, and “pretend”, but it isn’t really related to either, and it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a pseudo-word, or a non-word – a phonological form which is legitimate according to the rules governing English sound sequences, but which has no meaning associated with it.

This would be just so much abstruse blether, except that non-words have been put to use in practical real-life contexts, with intriguing consequences. There exists a particular kind of language impairment in which, out of all a child’s cognitive abilities, only their language development seems to be impaired (in the absence of factors such as brain damage, hearing impairment, and so on). This is called Specific Language Impairment, or SLI. It runs in families. It has a genetic component. And geneticists have demonstrated that there is a linkage between particular regions of particular chromosomes, and particular language-related skills – most interestingly, the ability to accurately repeat lists of “nonsense words”, in tests known as nonword repetition tests.

What these tests consist of is, generally, a pre-recorded list of non-words, such as “doppelate” and “ballop”. The child hears these items played one at a time, with enough of a pause in between for them to attempt to repeat what they’ve just heard. Children with SLI not only show less accuracy in producing these items (dokkelate, toppelate, toppate might be the kind of errors you’d elicit), but performance on this kind of test is, as they say, a good marker of a heritable phenotype.

The idea behind using nonword tests was, at least originally, that it would allow us to see what the child had really mastered of the English sound system, or what his or her phonological skills were really like, once divorced from the messiness attached to their production of real words (all sorts of factors affect a child’s acquisition of real-language vocabulary, and it’s quite possible for a particular sound to be mis-pronounced in one word but produced accurately in another word). If we’re interested in “pure phonology”, then seeing how children handle phonological forms which have no semantic, pragmatic, or lexical baggage would seem to be the ideal method.

Unfortunately, large numbers of practical difficulties very quickly emerged as soon as researchers started using nonword repetition tests. One is that you need to control exactly how similar a non-word is to real words: it matters that the nonword “ballop” is really quite reminiscent of both “gallop” and “ballot”. You also need to control what combinations of sound-segments appear in your nonwords: the sequence /mf/ is legal in English (“triumph”), but much rarer than the sequence /st/, and so much harder to repeat accurately. Longer nonwords are of course more difficult to remember and repeat than shorter ones, so if your set of nonwords includes many three-syllable items with rare sound sequences and many four-syllable items which are highly reminiscent of real words, it becomes much more difficult to pin down whether a child’s poor performance is due to specifically phonological issues (such as the rarity of the sound-sequence), versus more general memory-related issues such as the number of syllables they have to remember.

This, I think, feeds into a further problem which needs to be addressed, especially in the context of trying to design new sets of nonwords which would steer clear of these early problems and allow hypotheses to be tested to distinguish between what is “phonological” and what is general “memory” (or whatever). That is the question of what, precisely, are the aspects of phonology which are of most interest to researchers investigating language impairments with a genetic component. Taking an overview of the lexicon of, say, a typically developing 7-year-old, what are the specifically phonological properties of the lexical items which we can use to test the phonological competence of language-impaired children and their family members? Or, from the other direction, what are the properties, or hypothesised properties, of the putatively phonological impairments in SLI which would allow nonwords to be designed so as to elicit, or elucidate, error patterns of theoretical importance?

In other words, for example, should a good set of nonwords rely on CVCV structures only to the extent that these exist in the two-syllable words in the lexicon? Is it useful to include presumably articulatorily complex sequences such as triconsonantal clusters, or rare consonant sequences across syllable boundaries? What is the relationship between the relative frequency of particular consonants (eg dh) and their being late-acquired?
And what exactly would a specifically phonological impairment look like? Should errors be predicted mainly in one natural class, such as fricatives (but how would you differentiate a phonological difficulty with a natural class from an articulatory or perceptual difficulty with fricative production or perception?), or mainly in syllable structure, or stress assignment? Would you predict that a nonword where all the consonants were voiceless stops would be easier or harder than one where all the consonants were nasals, and if so, why? would it be useful to have multisyllabic items with all front vowels, or all back vowels, rather than a mixture?

This matters because presumably, the usefulness of nonword repetition tests is the light which they are supposed to shed on phonology – but of course speech sounds can only be described as phonological to the extent that they mirror the properties of real words as really used in a real language. (You can’t use nonword minimal pairs to demonstrate a phonemic difference, for example: minimal pairs can only be drawn from the lexicon.) So nonwords have to reflect in some way the actual characteristics of the items in a person’s or a population’s actual lexicon. Phonology can’t exist without a lexicon, but while on the one hand nonwords that are too similar to real words undermine the rationale behind using non-words in the first place, on the other hand nonwords that are too dissimilar from the lexicon make the task into one of attempting to pronounce non-native sound sequences, rather than plausible-but-non-existent native word. Erring in either of these directions will no doubt leave us better off than with stimuli which are poorly controlled for phonological properties, but there are still plenty questions which need an answer.

In a special session of UICTiL our very own Professor Nuñez-Cedeño and Junice Acosta will give a talk tomorrow about the Vocalization of Liquids in the Spanish of Cibao in the Dominican Republic.  The talk will take place at 3pm in 1750 University Hall (601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago IL 60607).

Abstract:

EN TORNO AL CONTEXTO REAL DE LA VOCALIZACIÓN CIBAEÑA: UN NUEVO REPLANTEAMIENTO PROSÓDICO

 Junice Acosta y Rafael Núñez-Cedeño (UIC)

 Se ha teorizado que  la  vocalización de líquidas en el español  cibaeño (VLEC) no es tan general.  arris  (1983:47-50) explica que el dominio de la regla que desencadena ese proceso sólo se aplica  líquidas finales de palabras prosódicas (Pp) y no a las de funcionales (Pfunc). De modo que si bien  en la oración él avisa, la líquida del pronombre se vocaliza, resultando en [[ej]Pp [aβísa]]Pp, no le ocurre lo mismo a la del determinante el aviso, la cual al estar estructurada como [e.la.βi.so]Pp, surge intacta.  

La  hipótesis de Harris se ha mantenido incuestionablemente  como la más robusta generalización de la VLEC en la literatura de los últimos 30 años. En este estudio,  basado en datos recientes  e instrumentales, ofrecemos un análisis que demuestra  que la vocalización se aplica tanto a  Pp, coincidiendo con el análisis de Harris, como a  Pfunc, disintiendo de su teoría. Dado estos resultados,  adoptamos su estructura prosódica pero con una importante modificación que incide significativamente en las predicciones y consecuencias de nuestro análisis. Proponemos, en apoyo a Selkirk (1996), que la Pfunc en posición proclítica es estructuralmente libre  y se supedita al nodo que ella denomina frase fonológica (Ff), contrario a la hipótesis de Harris, quien  la representa integrada a la palabra formando toda una Pp. Veremos también que el análisis tiene implicaciones en el desarrollo de la fonología infantil.

Our first UIC Talk in Linguistics is coming up Friday September 18th!  Our first speaker will be Marisol Garrida from Western Illinois University.  Her talk is entitled “Diphthongization of Non-High Vowel Squences in Latin American Spanish”.  The talk will take place in 1750 of University Hall (601 South Morgan Street) from 3pm to 5pm.

Abstract:
DIPHTHONGIZATION OF NON-HIGH VOWEL SEQUENCES IN LATIN AMERICAN SPANISH

Adjacent vowels in Spanish may be syllabified either as heterosyllabic
(V.V) or tautosyllabic (VV) sequences, depending on the vowel quality
and/or the position of the stress. As a general rule, sequences of
non-high vowels, or a stressed high vowel in contact with a non-high vowel
are to be articulated as two separate syllables (hiatus); the remaining
sequence combinations are to be parsed as tautosyllabic or diphthong
sequences.

Despite the established syllabification rules, previous studies on Spanish
phonology report on different variation phenomena. The resulting forms of
output include cases as contrastive as the articulation of ‘exceptional
hiatuses’ in Peninsular Spanish (e.g. [kli.én.te] for [kljen.te]
‘customer’) and the tendency to diphthongize hiatus sequences in Latin
American Spanish (e.g. [tja.tro] for [te.á.tro] ‘theater’).

Given the reported variation, this research focuses on the tendency to
diphthongization of canonical hiatus sequences (e.g. /ea/> /ja/ as desear
[de.se.ár]>[de.sjár] ‘to want’) observed in two different varieties of
Latin American Spanish (Mexican and Colombian).

Data collected from 39 college students from Bogota and Mexico City were
analyzed with the aim of establishing the different factors constraining
this sound change. Results presented in this talk compare the
pronunciation of the sequences /ea/ and /ia/ in two grammatical categories
(nouns and verbs) and three different stress contexts (pretonic, tonic and
posttonic). The data analyzed come from recorded speech samples (a total
of 2720 tokens) and the participants’ syllabification intuitions.
The overall results confirm that the tendency to diphthongize hiatus
sequences is highly spread in some Latin American varieties (data for the
oral syllabification task from Bogota showed that 52.2% of the words
containing the expected hiatus sequence ‘e.a’ were syllabified as
diphthongs, for Mexico City, 54.6% of the sequences were syllabified as
diphthongs).Additionally results from the acoustic analysis showed that
the articulation of a VV sequence varies from one stress context to
another. The tendency to reduce the hiatus sequence /ea/ to a
tautosyllabic articulation [ja] is more likely to occur in a stress
context other than tonic/initial, with posttonic position being the most
favorable for diphthongization to occur.

Results from this study contribute to the field of Spanish phonology in
three main aspects: they report on dialectal differences and similarities
from two different varieties, they confirm the relevance of proximity to
stress and relative position of the sequence in the word as a constraining
factor in the articulation of adjacent vowels, and they add to
methodological approaches by comparing results from two different
syllabification tasks, and showing that task choice plays an important
role when testing intuitive judgments.

I’m just back from a talk* where it was argued that language is far from a perfect or optimal system, but something that happens to work, most of the time, in spite of being bodged together in a clumsy and inelegant way (it could never have been designed to be this way, but with a bit of tinkering it comes to have the properties which make it at least functional).

The argument itself is coming from a background in American generative syntax, and so most of the argumentation was directed towards showing that human minds don’t and can’t represent entire trees for complicated syntactic structures. Which is actually, and thankfully, not even slightly controversial in many linguistics departments today, although apparently not all.

The phon-link, however, came in the discussion session following the talk, when one example of a clumsy solution to the language problem was drawn from speech production. According to the speaker, it’s not ideal that speech is produced via a single-tube system (ie the vocal tract) – because it gives rise to problems such as coarticulation.

For a single-sentence tutorial on coarticulation, consider the way that you say the word ‘ten’ on its own, and the way that you say the word sequence ‘ten past’ – the end of the word ‘ten’ becomes more similar to the start of the word ‘past’ when you say them together, particularly in fast speech. It might sound a bit more like ‘tem past’, in other words.

But coarticulation isn’t a problem. It’s not a problem for speakers, it’s not a problem for hearers – if it’s a problem for anyone, it’s only for people who adopt the troublesome assumption that the components of words have their own form in some sense independently of the words they belong to, and that this form somehow changes to take on the shape of adjacent or nearby segments when the segments are all assembled in order to be articulated. The problem in speech analysis is not how coarticulation can happen, but how segmentation can be motivated, for what is an inherently continuous (non-segmented) stream produced by the overlapping movements of the tongue, lips, jaw, and so on – and it’s in precisely the “transitions” between what could be thought of as “segments” that so much of the information that is most valuable for hearers is located.

To paraphrase someone else’s slogan – coarticulation in speech is not noise, but information! and the perception of inelegance and clumsiness is very much just in the eye of the beholder.

________________
* Actually, I’ve just discovered this wee rant languishing as a draft in a folder somewhere – the talk was so long ago I can barely remember what the speaker looked like. But I need to post it, if only for my own phon-related health. On account of unavoidable weekly commitments I haven’t been to the departmental phonetics/phonology seminar for weeks – months even – and the p-side of my brain (p-centre?) is getting worryingly undernourished.

It’s terribly exciting, there’s not only a new issue of the Speculative Grammarian out (the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics), but it’s a bumper issue of linguistic puzzles, and there’s one that I can just about finish.
~~~
Each equation contains the initials of words that will make it correct. Find the missing words.

~~~

I make that 3 types of non-pulmonic consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet, 4 vowel heights, 8 manners of articulation, 8 primary cardinal vowels (Daniel Jones), 11 places of articulation, 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, 26 of the Latin alphabet, and 6000 languages in the world. On 100 W, I’m stuck.

So no SpecGram T-shirt for me.

See also: Everything linguists have always wanted to know about logic, the Self-Defining Puzzle, and Who’s Who in Linguistics.

I’ve been reading Ken Lodge’s new book sporadically in my lunchtimes (A Critical Introduction to Phonetics). It’s not exactly what I expected it would be like, but gives plenty of useful insights. For any phon-people reading, Lodge has two articles on thorny subjects which are extremely interesting and provocative – ‘Some handy notes on phonology’ in the Journal of Linguistics (1997), and ‘Timing, segmental status, and aspiration in Icelandic’ in Transactions of the Philological Society, 2007.

Anyway,  here’s one of the by-the-way comments in his Critical Introduction:

“There is a strange tendency among British radio and television newsreaders and reporters who, of course, are reading out their texts, to stress the final syllable of a sentence or clause, irrespective of its structure (and meaning). … For example, I once heard an item about a threatened petrol crisis in East Anglia, which was soon going ‘to hit the [fɔ ˈkɔts]‘. This can only be understood as four courts, which, of course, is nonsense in this context; forecourts can only be [ˈfɔkɔts] …” (p118)

This isn’t something that’s ever particularly struck me (but maybe I’m listening to the wrong things). But there was one distinctly odd time when the travel report said that there were delays and closures on some road in England, due to “a lorry with a shedload.” I fully processed the thought, “a shedload of what?” before realising it must have actually been a lorry with a shed load.