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17 books about Phonetics & Phonology
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An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English, Volume 76
Erik R. Thomas, ed.
Duke University Press
An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English examines acoustical variations in vowel configurations in a wide variety of dialects of English found in the Western Hemisphere. While the work opens with an introduction on the methods and aims of the study, the following chapter immediately moves to a detailed discussion of distinctive vowel sounds called phonemes, characterizing each variant of sound listed within the cited reference literature. The remaining chapters provide explanatory descriptions of the variants of each dialect, reviewing past research specific to that dialect. While the United States English, Canadian English, and Caribbean varieties are featured in various chapters throughout the work, individual chapters are devoted to African-American, Mexican-American, and Native American English, emphasizing not only ethnic variation but delving into the historical development of each dialect. This monograph is an essential reference on vowel variation for all sociolinguists, phoneticians, phonologists, creolists, and historical linguists.
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African American English Speakers and Their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study, Volume 84
Erik R. Thomas
Duke University Press
This volume examines variation in vowel configurations in African American English as spoken by members of seven U.S. communities, including Roanoke Island, North Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and several parishes in rural Louisiana. The contributors argue that African American English exhibits considerable diversity, disproving the commonly held view that it is a uniform national dialect. Although some features of African American English are universal, others vary by region. In each community, African Americans adopted variants from local vernaculars. The study finds the most assimilation in the oldest communities in the rural South, where multiple races have lived together for centuries.
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An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics
Perry Link
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress PL1279.L483 2013 | Dewey Decimal 495.116
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao exhorted the Chinese people to “smash the four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Yet when the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square chanted “We want to see Chairman Mao,” they unknowingly used a classical rhythm that dates back to the Han period and is the very embodiment of the four olds. An Anatomy of Chinese reveals how rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey time-honored meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be consciously aware, and contributes to the ongoing debate over whether language shapes thought, or vice versa.
Perry Link’s inquiry into the workings of Chinese reveals convergences and divergences with English, most strikingly in the area of conceptual metaphor. Different spatial metaphors for consciousness, for instance, mean that English speakers wake up while speakers of Chinese wake across. Other underlying metaphors in the two languages are similar, lending support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain. The distinction between daily-life language and official language has been unusually significant in contemporary China, and Link explores how ordinary citizens learn to play language games, artfully wielding officialese to advance their interests or defend themselves from others.
Particularly provocative is Link’s consideration of how Indo-European languages, with their preference for abstract nouns, generate philosophical puzzles that Chinese, with its preference for verbs, avoids. The mind-body problem that has plagued Western culture may be fundamentally less problematic for speakers of Chinese.
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Elements of Acoustic Phonetics
Peter Ladefoged
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Library of Congress P221.5.L33 1996 | Dewey Decimal 612.78
This revised and expanded edition of a classic textbook provides a concise introduction to basic concepts of acoustics and digital speech processing that are important to linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists. The second edition includes four new chapters that cover new experimental techniques in acoustic phonetics made possible by the use of computers. Assuming no background in physics or mathematics, Ladefoged explains concepts that must be understood in using modern laboratory techniques for acoustic analysis, including resonances of the vocal tract and the relation of formants to different cavities; digital speech processing and computer storage of sound waves; and Fourier analysis and Linear Predictive Coding, the equations used most frequently in the analysis of speech sounds. Incorporating recent developments in our knowledge of the nature of speech, Ladefoged also updates the original edition's discussion of the basic properties of sound waves; variations in loudness, pitch, and quality of speech sounds; wave analysis; and the hearing and production of speech.
Like its predecessor, this edition of Elements of Acoustic Phonetics will serve as an invaluable textbook and reference for students and practitioners of linguistics and speech science, and for anyone who wants to understand the physics of speech.
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The Geometry of Visual Phonology
Linda Ann N. Uyechi
CSLI, 1996
Library of Congress HV2474.U88 1996 | Dewey Decimal 419
Uyechi presents an extremely thorough and formal empirical description of the various features of ASL signs, of interest to any theoretician in developing a theory of sign phonology or in testing claims in the theory of the phonology of spoken languages against data from a signed language. The author also presents a formalism for representing signs and makes a number of theoretical proposals based on this formalism. The volume's analysis indicates that the properties of core constructs of the spoken-language phonology, namely the segment and the syllable, differ from the properties of the core constructs in a formal framework of visual phonology. The Geometry of Visual Phonology also differs from other analyses in concluding that such differences are not immediately reconcilable. This volume provides a framework for discussing crucial differences between signs and speech.
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Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Library of Congress P121.L3855 2022 | Dewey Decimal 410
Language Files has become one of the most widely adopted, consulted, and authoritative introductory textbooks to linguistics ever written. The scope of the text makes it suitable for use in a wide range of courses, while its unique organization into student-friendly, self-contained sections allows for tremendous flexibility in course design.
The thirteenth edition has been revised, clarified, and updated throughout to ensure that it remains the most comprehensive and accessible introductory linguistics textbook on the market. The revised chapter on morphology includes a more thorough discussion of allomorphy and adds sections on templatic morphology, suprasegmental morphology, and morphological metathesis to give students a more complete picture of all morphological phenomena. The chapter on language and computers has been updated with new sections on deep learning, artificial neural networks, and on other areas of computational linguistics, providing readers with a better sense of current research and applications in this rapidly developing field. Other additions include new sections on syntactic non-constituents and non-generative rule systems in the syntax chapter and a complete rewrite to the creole languages file in the language contact chapter. We have also adopted the use of the singular they when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant. Exercises and lists of other readings have been updated throughout.
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The Last Phonological Rule: Reflections on Constraints and Derivations
Edited by John A. Goldsmith
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Library of Congress P217.L36 1993 | Dewey Decimal 414
Over the past three decades, phonological theory has advanced in many areas, but it has changed little in its foundational assumptions about how computational processes can serve as a basis for the theory. This volume suggests that it may be worthwhile to reconsider some of those assumptions. Is there an order to the rules in a phonological derivation? What kinds of links other than derivations are possible between the level of mental representation and the level of speech sounds? Since phonological representations are so much more sophisticated today than they were a few decads ago, do we need any phonological rules at all?
In this provocative book, leading linguists and computer scientists consider the challenges that computational innovations pose to current rule-based phonological theories and speculate about the advantages of phonological models based on artificial neural networks and other computer designs. The authors offer new conceptions of phonological theory for the 1990s, the most radical of which proposes that phonological processes cannot be characterized by rules at all, but arise from the dynamics of a system of phonological representations in a high-dimensional vector space of the sort that a neural network embodies. This new view of phonology is becoming increasingly attractive to linguists and others in the cognitive sciences because it answers some difficult questions about learning while drawing on recent results in philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience.
The contributors are John A. Goldsmith, Larry M. Hyman, George Lakoff, K. P. Mohanan, David S. Touretzky, and Deirdre W. Wheeler.
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The Linguistics of Punctuation
Geoffrey Nunberg
CSLI, 1990
Library of Congress PE1450.N78 1990 | Dewey Decimal 421.52
Geoffrey Nunberg challenges a widespread assumption that the linguistic structure of written languages is qualitatively identical to that of spoken language: It should no longer be necessary to defend the view that written language is truly language, but it is surprising to learn of written-language category indicators that are realized by punctuation marks and other figural devices.' He shows that traditional approaches to these devices tend to describe the features of written language exclusively by analogy to those of spoken language, with the result that punctuation has been regarded as an unsystematic and deficient means for presenting spoken-language intonation. Analysed in its own terms, however, punctuation manifests a coherent linguistic subsystem of 'text-grammar' that coexists in writing with the system of 'lexical grammar' that has been the traditional object of linguistic inquiry. A detailed analysis of the category structure of English text-sentences reveals a highly systematic set of syntactic and presentational rules that can be described in terms independent of the rules of lexical grammar and are largely matters of the tacit knowledge that writers acquire without formal instruction. That these rules obey constraints that are structurally analogous to those of lexical grammar leads Nunberg to label the text-grammar an 'application' of the principles of natural language organization to a new domain. Geoffrey Nunberg is a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
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Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies
Bruce Hayes
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Library of Congress P231.H38 1995 | Dewey Decimal 414.6
In this account of metrical stress theory, Bruce Hayes builds on the notion that stress constitutes linguistic rhythm—that stress patterns are rhythmically organized, and that formal structures proposed for rhythm can provide a suitable account of stress. Through an extensive typological survey of word stress rules that uncovers widespread asymmetries, he identifies a fundamental distinction between iambic and trochaic rhythm, called the "Iambic/Trochaic law," and argues that it has pervasive effects among the rules and structures responsible for stress.
Hayes incorporates the iambic/trochaic opposition into a general theory of word stress assignment, intended to account for all languages in which stress is assigned on phonological as opposed to morphological principles. His theory addresses particularly problematic areas in metrical work, such as ternary stress and unusual weight distinctions, and he proposes new theoretical accounts of them. Attempting to take more seriously the claim of generative grammar to be an account of linguistic universals, Hayes proposes analyses for the stress patterns of over 150 languages.
Hayes compares his own innovative views with alternatives from the literature, allowing students to gain an overview of the field. Metrical Stress Theory should interest all who seek to understand the role of stress in language.
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Perspectives in Phonology
Edited by Jennifer S. Cole and Charles Kisseberth
CSLI, 1997
Subject: Linguistics; Grammar--Phonology
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Phonetic Symbol Guide
Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Library of Congress P226.P85 1996 | Dewey Decimal 414
Phonetic Symbol Guide is a comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia of phonetic alphabet symbols, providing a complete survey of the hundreds of characters used by linguists and speech scientists to record the sounds of the world's languages.
This fully revised second edition incorporates the major revisions to the International Phonetic Alphabet made in 1989 and 1993. Also covered are the American tradition of transcription stemming from the anthropological school of Franz Boas; the Bloch/Smith/Trager style of transcription; the symbols used by dialectologists of the English language; usages of specialists such as Slavicists, Indologists, Sinologists, and Africanists; and the transcription proposals found in all major textbooks of phonetics.
With sixty-one new entries, an expanded glossary of phonetic terms, added symbol charts, and a full index, this book will be an indispensable reference guide for students and professionals in linguistics, phonetics, anthropology, philology, modern language study, and speech science.
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Phonology as Human Behavior: Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications
Yishai Tobin
Duke University Press, 1997
Library of Congress P217.T6 1997 | Dewey Decimal 414
Phonology as Human Behavior brings work in human cognition, behavior, and communication to bear on the study of phonology—the theory of sound systems in language. Yishai Tobin extends the ideas of William Diver—an influential linguist whose investigations into phonology reflect the principle that language represents a constant search for maximum communication with minimal effort—as a part of a new theory of phonology as human behavior. Showing the far-reaching psycho- and sociolinguistic utility of this theory, Tobin demonstrates its applicability to the teaching of phonetics, text analysis, and the theory of language acquisition. Tobin describes the methodological connection between phonological theory and phonetics by way of a comprehensive and insightful survey of phonology’s controversial role in twentieth-century linguistics. He reviews the work of Saussure, Jakobson, Troubetzkoy, Martinet, Zipf, and Diver, among others, and discusses issues in distributional phonology through analyses of English, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Using his theory to explain various functional and pathological speech disorders, Tobin examines a wide range of deviant speech processes in aphasia, the speech of the hearing-impaired, and other syndromes of organic origin. Phonology as Human Behavior provides a unique set of principles connecting the phylogeny, ontogeny, and pathology of sound systems in human language.
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Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations
Stephen R. Anderson
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Library of Congress P217.3.A53 1985 | Dewey Decimal 414
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Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics
Peter Ladefoged
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Library of Congress P221.L23 1971 | Dewey Decimal 414
This book is about some of the phonetic events that occur in the languages of the world. The data described consist mainly of contrasts observable at the systematic phonetic level in a wide variety of languages.
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Shaping Phonology
Edited by Diane Brentari and Jackson L. Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress P217.3.S53 2018 | Dewey Decimal 414
Within the past forty years, the field of phonology—a branch of linguistics that explores both the sound structures of spoken language and the analogous phonemes of sign language, as well as how these features of language are used to convey meaning—has undergone several important shifts in theory that are now part of standard practice. Drawing together contributors from a diverse array of subfields within the discipline, and honoring the pioneering work of linguist John Goldsmith, this book reflects on these shifting dynamics and their implications for future phonological work.
Divided into two parts, Shaping Phonology first explores the elaboration of abstract domains (or units of analysis) that fall under the purview of phonology. These chapters reveal the increasing multidimensionality of phonological representation through such analytical approaches as autosegmental phonology and feature geometry. The second part looks at how the advent of machine learning and computational technologies has allowed for the analysis of larger and larger phonological data sets, prompting a shift from using key examples to demonstrate that a particular generalization is universal to striving for statistical generalizations across large corpora of relevant data. Now fundamental components of the phonologist’s tool kit, these two shifts have inspired a rethinking of just what it means to do linguistics.
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Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure
N.S. Trubetzkoy
Duke University Press, 2001
Library of Congress P85.T75N19 2001 | Dewey Decimal 414.092
Edited and with an introduction by Anatoly Liberman Translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman N. S. Trubetzkoy (1890–1939) is generally celebrated today as the creator of the science of phonology. While his monumental Grundzüge der Phonologie was published posthumously and contains a summary of Trubetzkoy’s late views on the linguistic function of speech sounds, there has, until now, been no practical way to trace the development of his thought or to clarify the conclusions appearing in that later work. With the publication of Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure, not only will linguists have that opportunity, but a collection of Trubetzkoy’s work will appear in English for the first time. Translated from the French, German, and Russian originals, these articles and letters present Trubetzkoy’s work in general and on Indo-European linguistics. The correspondence reprinted here, also for the first time in English, is between Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. The resulting collection offers a view of the evolution of Trubetzkoy’s ideas on phonology, the logic in laws of linguistic geography and relative chronology, and the breadth of his involvement with Caucasian phonology and the Finno-Ugric languages. A valuable resource, this volume will make Trubetzkoy’s work available to a larger audience as it sheds light on problems that remain at the center of contemporary linguistics.
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What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?: The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception
Reuven Tsur
Duke University Press, 1992
Library of Congress P119.T78 1992 | Dewey Decimal 414.6
Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur’s point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists. Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural perception: a nonspeech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises; and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. Here, Tsur proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness. Using Roman Jakobson’s model of childhood acquisition of the phonological system, Tsur shows how the nonreferential babbling sounds made by infants form a basis for aesthetic valuation of language. He tests the intersubjective and intercultural validity of various spatial and tactile metaphors for certain sounds. Illustrating his insights with reference to particular literary texts, Tsur considers the relative merits of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the emotional symbolism of speech sounds.
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