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Sounds and Prosodies
... It can be placed broadly within the Firthian prosodic tradition of phonology (e.g. Firth, 1948; for a discussion, see Sampson, 1980) and is multi-metafunctional, multimodal and meaning-focused in scope. The various sound distinctions produced in the vocal tract can be broadly classified into those that realize phonemic distinctions (the vowels and consonants of a language) and those realizing non-phonemic distinctions -the latter often referred to under the heading prosodic phonology (e.g. ...
... The various sound distinctions produced in the vocal tract can be broadly classified into those that realize phonemic distinctions (the vowels and consonants of a language) and those realizing non-phonemic distinctions -the latter often referred to under the heading prosodic phonology (e.g. Firth, 1948;Crystal, 1969;Hirschberg, 2002;Jun, 2005). It is the latter resources that we focus on in this chapter. ...
... In the process, these linguists raise public awareness of functionalism in linguistics and inspire other scholars to do research, develop and expand functional approach. Halliday's SFG has been constructed and developed on the ground of Firth (1948) and Hjelmslev (1969) account. Halliday (2002:12) follows Hjelmslev and Firth in distinguishing theoretical from descriptive categories in linguistics. ...
... He argues that 'theoretical categories, and their inter-relations, construe an abstract model of language...they are interlocking and mutually defining". Firth (1948) explains the three significant matters: prosodies, context and system versus structure. First, he points out that prosodies are features extending over stretches of an utterance. ...
It is difficult to track the philosophy foundation and epistemology of systemic functional grammar (SFG) formulated by Halliday in the 1980s as this kind of grammar views language as a systemic resource for meaning. Besides, it has had global impacts on linguistics and flourished in contemporary linguistic theory. Anyone who is familiar with Halliday’s work realizes that his SFG is an approach designed to analyze English texts. Halliday (1994: xv) explicitly states that “to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English.” The aim of this study is not about the applicability of SFG to text analysis as many researchers and scholars do. Our efforts are made to clarify the philosophical foundation of Halliday’s SFG. The paper presents on triangle: (i) language, mind and world; (ii) and empiricism in Halliday’s SFG.
... We will merely provide pointers to the relevance of this line of research for the notions of canonical and reduced forms. In particular, the notion of prosodies as devel- oped by Firth (1948) is crucial insofar as it represents a bridge between Trubeckoj's neglected concerns on the one hand and the later literature on reduction on the other. Prosodies are defined as abstractions that concur to describe "word struc- ture and its musical attributes", thus going beyond the linear and discrete rep- resentation provided by "the total phonological complex" (Firth 1948: 123). ...
... An early formulation of the problem, which joins ends with our discussion in Section 9.2.1 on the importance of written evidence in the early phases of modern linguistics, can be found again in Firth (1948): ...
We conclude the book’s reflections on reduction and reduced forms by exploring the complementary concept of canonical forms, which has profoundly shaped research on sound segments and their realization. Canonical forms have been described as symbolic, linear, and minimalistically contrastive representations, as in the case of phonological transcriptions of words. They have been conceived as mental word templates that can be eroded step by step in speech production, and then have to be reconstructed in speech perception. As a consequence, in theories focusing on canonical forms, reduced forms have often been relegated to energy efficiency or mere performance accidents. Drawing insights from (a) the history of linguistics (with a focus on the reasons behind the long-standing success of canonical forms) and (b) the book’s contributing chapters (with a focus on how the study of reduced forms can inform linguistic theory), we identify four directions into which reduction research must be extended in the future with empirically rather than canonically defined reference forms. These are reduction patterns and reference forms in the area of prosody, reinforcement or strengthening as the antithesis of speech reduction, factors for predicting degree of reduction and their phonetic results, and, with regard to the latter, the separate contribution of reduction to communicative function. These research directions will help us to reassess our understanding of the dichotomy between canonical and reduced forms.
... The case of Turkish played a role in the development of a distinctive feature framework out of the distinctive-oppositions framework advanced by the Prague school (Trubetzkoy 1939 not necessarily regarded as properties of single segments, but might also extend over larger domains like the syllable or the word. Such properties were called 'prosodies' (Firth 1948). A representative exponent here would be Waterson (1956), who analyses Turkish vowel harmony by means of four prosodies, viz. a front and a back prosody, and a rounded and a non-rounded prosody. ...
... As such, it exists on the metrical tier and requires a metrical foot to surface. For similar analyses of glottalization as a prosodic feature, see Bradley (1970), Firth (1948), Penner (2019), Pike and Small (1974 The constraint which captures this relationship between metrical structure and glottalization is FOOT{ʔ} (67). Since the glottal stop is a feature of metrical foot, it needs to a metrical foot to surface, but its exact position with the foot is determined through a ranking of different constraints. ...
This paper describes and analyzes phonological processes pertinent to the glottal stop in A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3: con). The operations which the glottal stops undergo and trigger reveal an interaction of two morphophonological parameters: stratum and stress dominance. First, verbal suffixes are organized in two morphophonological domains, or strata. Within the inner domain, glottal stops affect stress placement, which I analyze as an interaction with foot structure. In the outer domain, glottal stops do not have any effects on stress. Second, some verbal suffixes delete stress (i. e. they are dominant). Dominance is unpredictable and independent of the suffix’s morphophonological domain, but dominance and the phonological domain interact in a non-trivial way: only inner dominant suffixes delete glottalization. To account for the A’ingae data, I adopt Cophonologies by Phase (Sande et al. 2020), which (i) models phonological stratification while (ii) allowing for morpheme-specific phonological idiosyncrasies, which (iii) interact with the phonological grammar of their stratum. Stress deletion triggered by the dominant suffixes is modeled with AntiFaithfulness (Alderete 1999, 2001). Antifaithfulness to a metrical foot entails antifaithfulness to its features (glottalization). This captures the fact that only the inner dominant suffixes delete glottal stops.
... The extreme behaviour of tone by way of movement, spread, floating, segmentalisation, contraction, deletion, to mention but a few, had long been recognised by linguists, thus paving way for a robust account of the tonal alternations in the orientation of the structuralists/descriptivists (e.g., Firth 1948, Pike 1948, Winston 1960, Armstrong 1968, Schachter & Fromkin 1968, Welmers 1969, Hyman and Schuh 1974, Hyman 1979, Emenanjo 1976, Elimelech 1976, Clements 1979, Chumbow 1982, Williamson 1986, among many others). However, with the adoption of the theoretical machineries of AP and OT, the characteristics of tone in (West) African languages (and, indeed, those of Asian languages) could well be understood. ...
https://rupkatha.com/v15n202 Full-text PDF https://rupkatha.com/V15/n2/v15n202.pdf Abstract Ùrhòbò is a southwest Edoid language spoken in southern Nigeria. Its tonal patterns have been studied, but from a descriptive perspective, which, from a theoretical standpoint, potentially limits the understanding that tonal deviations from underlying forms are essentially due to resolutions of conflicts between some competing constraints. This study adopts the Optimality Theory (OT) to reveal the competing universal constraints: IDENT-T, MAX-T; NoFUSION; LINEARITY; DISASSOC; ALIGN-R CONTOUR; OCP; SPECIFY-T; *FLOAT; and NoCONTOUR. The study shows that these constraints crucially govern the Urhobo tonal patterns such as (i) downstep; (ii) single multiply-linked high (H) tone; (iii) single multiply-linked low (L) tone; (iv) boundary H.H and L.L tones fusion; (v); H-tone preservation; (vi) LH-tone preservation; (vii) floating H tone; and, (viii) final HL contour tone. Moreover, it highlights two Ùrhòbò-specific tonal alternations listed in (v) and (vi), which exhibit preservation of H and LH tones at the expense of L tone, post-lexically. Consequently, it proposes four markedness constraints NoH.L-T, NoL.H-T, NoH.LH-T, and NoL. to explain the preservation effects. Our findings support phonologists' view that, crosslinguistically, universal (and language-specific) constraints are those that motivate tonal deviations from input forms in tone languages, and that minimally marked tonal outputs are the result of markedness dominance over faithfulness.
... In this paper I restrict myself to phonology. In future work it would be valuable to determine what is specific to phonology and what generalizes to other parts of grammar also. 2 This is not to say that segmentation is uncontroversial, either in its particular details or in the fundamental correctness of the assumptions that stand behind it (e.g.Firth 1948). Segmentation entails a discretization of the temporal unfolding of speech. ...
Typologists strive to compare like with like, but four dilemmas make this challenging in phonology: (1) the non-uniqueness of phonological analysis; and the existence of (2) multiple levels of analysis; (3) multiple theories of phonology; and (4) analytical interdependencies between phonological phenomena. Here I argue that the four dilemmas can be coherently related, and then addressed together. I introduce the concept of criterial conflicts, derived from notions in canonical typology. Criterial conflicts arise in the presence of an unexpected pairing of properties that pulls an analysis in two directions. This contradictory pull and its resolution in different directions leads by various paths to the four dilemmas. Concrete strategies are then discussed for countering the common, underlying problem. I observe that criterial conflicts are well handled by factorial analysis (i.e., multiple normalization) and multivariate analysis, but not by simple normalization. Illustrative examples are taken from the canonical typology of segments.
... Following Jakobson et al. (1951), the features provide the "glue" between action and perception (because features must have definitions in terms of both action/articulation and perception/audition), and I also claim, following Poeppel et al. (2008) (but with much less evidence), that features constitute a basic element of storage in long-term memory. An individual event can have multiple features; equivalently, features can be bound together in an event, yielding segmentlike properties (like Firthian sounds; see Firth 1948, Kazanina et al. 2017, or events can contain relatively few features, even just a single feature, leading to autosegmental-like behaviours (akin to Firthian prosodies). ...
Substance-free phonology or SFP (Reiss 2017) has renewed interest in the question of abstraction in phonology. Perhaps the most common form of abstraction through the absence of substance is underspecification, where some aspects of speech lack representation in memorized representations, within the phonology or in the phonetic implementation (Archangeli 1988, Keating 1988, Lahiri and Reetz 2010 among many others). The fundamental basis for phonology is argued to be a mental model of speech events in time, following Raimy (2000) and Papillon (2020). Each event can have properties (one-place predicates that are true of the event), which include the usual phonological features, and also structural entities for extended events like moras and syllables. Features can be bound together in an event, yielding segment-like properties. Pairs of events can be ordered in time by the temporal logic precedence relation represented by ‘<’. Events, features and precedence form a directed multigraph structure with edges in the graph interpreted as “maybe next”. Some infant bimodal speech perception results are examined using this framework, arguing for underspecification in time in the developing phonological representations.
... The study of the syllable was a natural development of autosegmental phonology. The connections between prosodies and autosegmental tiers have been well documented (Firth, 1948; see also Coleman, this volume; Leben, this volume). Three of the primary motivators of this development were that i) tone bearing units TBUs were syllabic rather than segmental units (Goldsmith 1976), ii) the syllable more elegantly accounted for a wide variety of phenomena than the segment in SPE (Hooper, 1972), and iii) segmental identity itself was often determined by the role the feature bundle played in the syllable (e.g., vowel~glide alternations; Itô 1986;Levin 1985;Dell and Elmedlaoui 1985). ...
This chapter outlines the contribution of autosegmental phonology to the field of sign language phonology. Phonological description is influenced by the theoretical models used to express them, and at the time of Goldsmith’s thesis (published in 1976), research on sign language phonology was still in its infancy. In Stokoe (1960), the first monograph of sign language phonology, phonological representations of American Sign Language (ASL) were described very differently than phonological representations of spoken languages at the time. Two phenomena from autosegmental theory that were of great benefit to sign language phonology will be discussed in this paper. First, the simultaneous and multi-dimensional possibilities inherent in autosegmental phonology provided a means to talk about the sign language “parameters” of handshape, movement, and place of articulation in terms that were comprehensible to researchers working on spoken languages. Second, the link between autosegmental phonology and prosodic structure, and advances in our understanding of the syllable, allowed syllable weight and sonority to be considered according to both its simultaneous and sequential organization, rather than via sequential mechanisms alone.
... En particular, las teorías "no lineales" convergen con la aproximación basada en moldes en cuanto a la representación multilineal que sitúa distintos rasgos en distintas posiciones del esqueleto prosódico. El principal antecedente de ambos enfoques proviene de la aproximación prosódica a la fonología planteada por Firth (1957), quien utiliza la metáfora de la notación musical para describir las representaciones fonológicas. La consecuencia lógica de esta representación no lineal es la necesidad de considerar la palabra como la unidad básica de análisis fonológico, que caracteriza al enfoque de los moldes y a la fonologóa no lineal. ...
... Este fono labiodental es complejizante (de articulación neutra a desplazada, el labio inferior retrocede y contacta los dientes superiores, Laver, 2004: 137). Los postulados y marco teórico provienen del Modelo Polisistémico Natural, MPN, de orientación neofirciana (Firth 1948, fuente primigenia de la visión polisistémica, radicalmente opuesta a la simetría unisistemicista del reduccionismo fonémico; Chela-Flores 1998, 2000. Además, como señal de errores o desconocimiento de la necesidad de ampliación analítica de los instrumentos fonéticofonológicos y las consensuadas categorías, podemos citar la inexistencia de fricativas "débiles" a pesar de que algunos fonetistas todavía erróneamente, lo sugieren. ...
Los objetivos son la reinterpretación del continuum variación‐cambio y la situación especial del español entre las lenguas neolatinas. Se propone un proceso socio‐evolutivo entre la milenaria divinización del lenguaje y la estandarización, un producto de la Modernidad, ambas fases con motivaciones y manifestaciones diferentes. La gradación variación‐ cambio actual se deriva, en buena medida, de la co‐ existencia de una presunta superioridad univarietal — desarrollada entre las fases evolutivas propuestas— y la interacción sociocomunal. La reinterpretación de esta situación evolutiva enfatiza el concepto clave del continuum y su polaridad, añadiendo otras dimensiones, entre las cualesse destaca la indetenible gradiencia dialectal. Se propone, por primera vez, una modificación del restrictivo concepto de distribución complementaria de un nivel —básico en el ciclo de vida del fonema tradicional— al añadir un segundo nivel. Esto es posible a la luz de la unión de la fonología cognitiva y el uso interaccional sociocomunal, que da otra dimensión explicativa al concepto del fonema, considerado entidad imperecedera. Se analiza la alta inteligibilidad interdialectal hispánica —notable entre lenguas neolatinas— para la cual se plantea una explicación basada en su excepcional vocalismo.
... For phonology, I had not seen any example of systemic functional phonology at all. I had seen Firthian phonology (e.g., Firth 1948;Palmer 1970), but while this phonology was prosodic and polysystemic, it was not that systemic in the sense of systemic phonology (cf. Matthiessen 2021). ...
This chapter first summarizes the contributions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to computational linguistics. It elaborates on Martin Kay’s Functional Unification Grammar, highlights the achievements of the Penman Project on text generation directed by William C. Mann and comments on the influences from computational linguistics on SFL. The connections between Cardiff Grammar and Nigel Grammar are also discussed.
... Stressed vowels are produced with greater intensity and duration than reduced vowels, and thus are more perceptually salient to listeners (Flemming 2009;Harrington 2010). In contrast, syllable-timed languages usually do not have reduced vowels in unstressed positions and tend to give syllables approximately equal prominence (Firth 1948;Dauer 1983;Auer 1993;Dankovi cov a & Dellwo 2007). In other words, syllables in syllable-timed languages are more similar to each other. ...
A growing body of literature suggests that the world's languages can be classified into three rhythm classes: mora-timed languages, stress-timed languages, and syllable-timed languages. However, scholars cannot agree on which rhythmic measures discriminate rhythm classes most satisfactorily and whether the speech rate factor should be considered. In this study, we analyze speech production by bilingual speakers, and compare their production with that of monolingual speakers and ESL speakers. Our rhythmic metric measure results show that when speech rate is taken into consideration, a combination of the two metric measures for vowels, Varco∆V and vocalic nPVI , is most reliable in discriminating different rhythm classes, while consonants do not seem effective, whether the speech rate factor is included or not.
... Second, even in the same segmental environments, a given phoneme can have strikingly different phonetic 1 As a result, the linguistic, phonetic and perceptual role of the segment was put under examination. Studies undermining the central role of the phoneme started with acoustic investigations on perceptual units (Cooper et al. 1952), progressed within Firthian and articulatory phonology in the following decades (Firth 1948;Browman & Goldstein 1986), and have been recast in connection with the history of writing systems already since Faber (1992), and more recently by Albano Leoni (2006) and Port (2006). ...
... And secondly, because in a similarly unreflective way to Bickerton's argument, the 'theory' says so. The theory in this case is that of 'autosegmental' phonology (Goldsmith, 1976), which from a historical point of view has largely rediscovered some of the insights of prosodic phonology of 30 years earlier (Firth, 1948;Robins, 1957). 'Historically' , as Brown remarks with unconscious irony -the only 'history' that matters started in 1957! -'there has been a long standing debate in [generative] phonology between a so-called levels perspective and a so-called configurations or contours perspective' . ...
If music is treated as a kind of 'language', then it makes sense for musicology to borrow from linguistics in order to define exactly what sort of a 'language' music is. However, not only does this avoid the challenge of defining music on its own terms, it also brings across a whole lot of unnecessary historical baggage. Through a close analysis of selected texts, the current article critiques some recent work in musicology, showing how it is based on a far too narrow understanding of what constitutes linguistics, i.e. basically formal linguistics. It points out some of the dangers of interdisciplinary work such as Brown's (2001) 'musilanguage' model, and shows how a less than careful borrowing of linguistic concepts can vitiate the usefulness of such system-building. It then traces the source of much of this borrowing in Lerdahl and Jackendoff 's (1983) highly influential work drawing on generative linguistics, and shows how a framework that privileges structure over meaning, system over text, and the cognitive over the social, is unable to provide a broader understanding of music beyond pattern recognition. It calls for a greater methodological scepticism among musicologists towards linguistics, and a greater self-consciousness about borrowings across disciplines.
... Semantic prosody is a significant but controversial concept in corpus linguistics. It was first described by Sinclair (1991) learning from the concept of 'prosody' in the phonetic research of Firth (1948). The term semantic prosody, used in public for the first time by Louw (1993), has attracted widespread attention from academic circles. ...
This paper studies the implicit structures and the diffusion modes of semantic prosody on the dependency networks of some English words such as cause and their Chinese equivalents. It is found that the structure of semantic prosody is a bi-stratified network consisting of a few large clusters gathering in the center with most nodes of low dependency capability scattered around. With regard to the diffusion modes, results show that: (i) within one shortest path length, the core words directly attract the nodes with the same or similar semantic characteristics and exclude those with conflicting ones, creating the clearest and the most intense semantic diffusion; (ii) over one shortest path length, semantic diffusion is achieved through content words or function words, and the semantic diffusion modes created with function words as bridges are relatively vaguer and more complicated ones. This conclusion also results in the semantic prosodies of other English words and their Chinese equivalent words, revealing, to some extent, a common cognitive approach to understanding the internal structure and the diffusion modes of semantic prosody.
... • Autosegmental phonology is a theory of the phonetic representation of phonological elements whose early insights came from Bloch (1948), Firth (1948) and Hockett (1955) among others. As Goldsmith (1976:16) explains, ...
The topic of this academic discussion is interesting as it leads us to rehearse major landmarks in the development and growth of phonology, and must be appreciated, not only for the information and learning it provides to suit intelligent agitations, but for addressing age-old quests in the development of the phonological sciences and linguistics. • Volume however constrains the discussion to focus on the linearity variable-a notion that tends to divide investigations in phonological history into two major perspectives that contingently make the field strong; as they are the duo to know, to know the phonological sciences holistically.
... This assumption is by no means an innovative step; indeed, the essence of this notion may be traced back to a period which pre-dates even the earliest autosegmental models of the 1970s -to the work of J.R. Firth and others associated with the London School of Linguistics. Firth's theory of Prosodic Analysis® developed in resistance to the prevailinĝ°S ee Firth (1948) for an insight into the motivation behind this theoretical stance. The reader is also referred to S.R. Anderson (1985) for a short introduction to Prosodic Analysis, while a more detailed discussion is found in Palmer (1970). ...
A number of constraint-based models of phonology have established a shift in emphasis away from rules and derivations towards a more representationally-oriented view of description. This enrichment of representational structure has led to a significant reduction in the generative power of the phonological component. This thesis proposes that the advantages of the Element Theory (Kaye et al. 1985, Harris & Lindsey 1995) approach to melodic structure - which maintains this trend towards greater generative restrictiveness - may be enhanced by the introduction of an intra-segmental geometry of melodic tiers. A hierarchy of element tiers for vowels is constructed according to the same principles of licensing that control prosodic structure, allowing a unified representational hierarchy that highlights the interrelatedness between melody and prosody. The melodic geometry of a language is built around a limited set of parametric choices that control tier sharing/division, the structural dependency relations holding between elements, and the possibilities for licensing a complement tier (which replaces the notion of melodic headship). The sub-segmental tier structure of a language provides a melodic template, latently present under all prosodic positions, which delimits the range of oppositions each position may potentially support. This template interacts with only a single kind of lexical activation instruction - ACTIVATE [α] - which typically applies at the skeletal level to give the kinds of 'segmental' contrasts found universally. Licensing Inheritance (Harris 1992, 1997) then applies throughout the unified melodic-prosodic structure, predicting various dynamic phenomena and distributional asymmetries associated with prosodic strength and structural complexity. Optionally, activation is specified at higher prosodic levels (e.g. foot, word), resulting in the interpretation of a melodic property over a domain larger than the segment. While a word-level instruction ACTIVATE [A] describes height harmony, for example, a similar specification of a complement tier will predict the alternation patterns of tongue root harmony systems. Analyses of languages exhibiting ATR harmony (Turkana, Bari, Kinande) and RTR harmony (Yoruba, Wolof) demonstrate (i) the restrictive nature of the tier geometry model and (ii) its capacity for incorporating typological variation such as opacity versus transparency and a~ə alternations.
... It has often been assumed that in English there is a relationship between r and schwa (Firth 1948, Jones 1969, for example). Broadbent (1991) ...
In this thesis I am concerned with the way in which coronal segments should be represented. I argue that coronality is a phonetic rather than a phonological concept and that coronal segments are represented in the phonological component by the aperture particle A. In vowels, the aperture particle represents the central vowel of the language. In a language such as English therefore, A represents schwa. One consequence of this is that I am able to establish a connection between the most commonly unmarked vowel (i.e. a schwa-/a/ type vowel) and the unmarked oral place, namely coronal. In chapter 1, I set out the background to the study of the representation of coronal. In the general background I outline the representational issues which a thesis of this kind needs to consider. The specific introduction deals with two contemporary phonological debates in which coronals are central. The first concerns the extent to which consonants and vowels share the same place features and the second concerns their unmarked and special status. In chapter 2, I discuss the classic problem of linking and intrusive r in English. I argue that r-sandhi is a process of Glide Formation. Once r-sandhi is viewed in this way two consequences ensue. First of all, I can provide a non-arbitrary account of this problem and secondly, a connection is suggested between schwa, represented by A, and /r/. In chapter 3, I consider the possibility that the use of A can be extended to other coronal segments. The principle data source is English. Specifically, synchronic dialectal phenomena and some diachronic phenomena are adduced as evidence for a A-coronal connection. Having established this, I consider the way in which coronal can be derived from A. Chapter 4 discusses the implications of the representation of consonantal place in a system where coronal is represented by A. Chapter 5 considers the implications of the link between schwa-A and coronal for the special status of coronals. Finally, in chapter 6, I return to the widely-held coronal-vowel connection introduced in chapter 1. I discuss an approach which groups coronal consonants with front vowels and evaluate some of the evidence put forward to support this class. I demonstrate that some of the main supporting evidence is more compatible with the coronal-A approach.
... The idea that the meaning of a word is colored by its co-occurring words, and that meaning is "not ascribable to words in isolation" but "established on the basis of words and the context in which they occur" (Dam-Jensen and Zethsen 2008: 205) is further developed into the notions of 'semantic prosody' and 'semantic preferences. ' Semantic prosody was first mentioned in Firth (1948), although his use of the notion was limited to "phonological coloring which spreads beyond semantic boundaries" (Zhang 2010: 190). This was later discussed further by Sinclair (1987), and in 1993 Louw defined semantic prosody as the "constant aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates" (1993: 159). ...
The concept of ‘individualism’ is central to modern understandings of human behavior and society, yet it is also an example of a “new” concept introduced to Chinese society in the early 1900s. Due to the complex interplay between linguistic, socio-cultural, and ideological factors involved, the meaning of ‘individualism’ has undergone continual change from the early 1900s to today. As translation not only plays a vital role in knowledge dissemination, but is also a site where dynamic knowledge negotiation is carried out, this study uses a corpus-based methodology to examine the ways in which ‘individualism’ has been redefined, re-established and reconstructed in China through translation during the period between 1910 and 2010. The study ultimately argues that concepts and ideas are constantly renegotiated and redefined as they travel from one culture to another, and as they travel through time.
... Similarly, the use of segments as relevant landmarks for the text implicitly assumes a strictly sequential representation of speech. This view has been challenged by models that emphasise the temporal overlap in the activation of different articulators [9], the continuous nature of the acoustic signal [10], the integrated nature of speech perception [11] and the epiphenomenal nature of phoneme-sized units [12]. ...
A widespread approach to research on intonation categories involves extracting relevant landmarks in the tune (e.g. F0 turning points) and relating them to relevant landmarks in the text (e.g. phone boundaries). This approach is problematic, both in theoretical terms (e.g. no consensus as to what is a relevant landmark in either domain) and in practical terms (e.g. locating segments and F0 turning points with either error prone automatic annotations or time-consuming manual annotations). We propose and test an alternative approach that overcomes both types of problem. The tune is modelled taking into account the shape of F0 contours, and the text is modelled by means of periodic energy curves. We exploit the interaction between these two dynamic trajectories to observe and quantify intonation. Compared to the standard approach, our method requires less manual work and makes fewer theoretical assumptions, but nonetheless has similar descriptive power.
... Our phonological analyses are based upon Halliday's (1970) systemic functional phonology which was in uenced by Firth's (1948) work on non-segmental prosody and work in Chinese phonology (Wang 1936). This approach to phonology takes the foot as the fundamental rhythmic unit of spoken English (for a related discussion of rhythm see Caldwell this volume). ...
... The latter was "explained in a separate appendix, worth study by itself as a clear illustration of the prosodic method of phonological analysis pioneered by Firth" (Robins 1961: 377). Firth (1948) opposed the analysis of the speech signal as a sequence of phonemes, i.e. discrete segments defined by fixed sets of features. Rather, he postulated that phonetic features may spread across segments, which he referred to as prosodies. ...
With the death of Michael Halliday on 15 April 2018, the world has lost a unique scholar who, with reference to the Renaissance concept of a ‘universal man’ can truly be called a ‘universal linguist’. Halliday’s work and thought has cast new light on all core areas of linguistics and on an exceptional range of cross-disciplinary domains involving linguistics, amongst which he himself singled out (Martin 2013: 185-186) text and discourse analysis, language development, computational studies, educational linguistics and sociolinguistics. Importantly, the opening up of horizons in all these domains is fundamentally rooted in his intense concern with the very core of linguistic meaning-making: how does the form of a language, i.e. its phonology and lexicogrammar, code linguistic interaction? It is this concern that makes his linguistic legacy, which engages with language description, theory and praxis, “astonishingly coherent” (Engels 1990: 724).
Halliday’s enormous impact on the field is most obvious in the rich (discourse) semantics he has described, mainly of English, and in what can be done with these semantics in cross-disciplinary domains. What has received less attention is the point that for Halliday semantic description fundamentally has to pass through functional-structural analysis of the phonological and lexicogrammatical form of any specific language (Halliday 1985: xxxi). Halliday has often been recorded as saying that he thought of himself as primarily a grammarian (Martin 2013: 185), but in personal conversations he spoke with particular delight about the contributions he had made to prosodic analysis (p.c. Halliday 2018). Halliday (2014: 4) in fact wrote that it was perhaps because he naturally tended “towards the expression end” [i.e. the phonological end of the linguistic sign] that he “became a grammarian, to redress the balance”.
The first part of this tribute will survey Halliday’s work on language description and theory formation, which he viewed as inextricably interrelated: “Halliday emphasised that linguists should work simultaneously on two fronts. Detailed description of the grammars of a wide range of languages is necessary as input to high level generalisations about ‘the general nature of any grammar’” (Dixon 1984: 5). I will chronicle Halliday’s phonological and grammatical descriptions of Chinese (1.1.1), English (1.2.1), and the protolanguage of one specific child (1.3.1). These descriptions were started at different stages of his career, and he set about them, motivated by a specific “set of problems [and] queries” (Halliday in interview, Martin 2013: 183), which I will situate in their historical context. As the descriptions evolved, new theoretical insights arose about such topics as the semiotic structure of language, the categories needed to carry out phonological and lexicogrammatical analysis, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language organization, the functional motivation of the internal structure of the language system, and the relations between language use, context, and society. To bring out the interaction between description and theory formation, I will discuss Halliday’s Scale and Category model (1.1.2) in relation to his work on Chinese (1.1.1), his articulation of Systemic Functional Linguistics (1.2.2) in the context of his description of English (1.2.1), and his ideas on language as a social semiotic (1.3.2) in relation to his studies of language development (1.3.1).
In the second part of the tribute, Halliday’s contributions to, and impact on, cross-disciplinary domains will be briefly surveyed. Throughout these two parts, many of the people Halliday interacted with will be highlighted, his mentors and collaborators, and many scholars who were inspired by him, but it is impossible to do justice to, or even mention, all.
Abstract
The purpose of the research is to study the phonological mutations of Persian loanwords in Arabic , on the
focus of the Phonological processes . Speakers of any language use the loan word , and They change in
their native morphological and phonological system. Authors gathered 300 Persian loan words which are
originated from Persian language then he extracts phonetic forms and phonological differences of these
words from two languages. The framework of the study is OT (Optimality Theory). The current study
attempts to diagnose linguistically systematic phonological changes and provide a typology for classifying
them. The findings of the study are that interdentally, pharyngeal, and bilabial glide places of articulation
are inactive articulators in Persian and Persian language speakers replace loan words containing these
consonants with the closest consonants in terms of place of articulation. The aim of this study is to
investigate phonological and phonetic changes in both languages. In this research, first lexical Which has
been specified from Persian and Arabic languages, then Study of phonological changes such as
phonological stress , change, insertion, deletion, Softening, and metathesis are discussed .In this research,
descriptive and analytical methods used to collect data.
The Continuity of Linguistic Change presents a collection of selected papers in honour of Professor Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. The essays revolve around the study of linguistic variation and the mechanisms and processes associated with linguistic change, a field to which Villena-Ponsoda has dedicated so many years of research. The authors are researchers of renowned international prestige who have made significant contributions in this field. The chapters cover a range of related topics and provide modern theoretical and methodological perspectives, addressing the structural, cognitive, historical and social factors that underlie and promote linguistic change in varieties of Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. The reader will find contributions that explore topics such as phonology, acoustic phonetics and processes deriving from the contact between languages or linguistic varieties, specifically levelling, koineisation, standardisation and the emergence of ethnolects.
Based on COHA and GloWbE, this study explores the frequency distribution and semantic preference on the nominal stems of two near-synonymous suffixes -proof and -resistant by means of linguistic motion chart and covarying collexeme analysis. The results show that for N-proof, the nominal stems cover a wide variety of nouns related to our daily life, including words such as bullet, water and fire, and this schematic construction is mainly followed by costume nouns, whereas for N-resistant, its first slot is usually filled by biomedical nouns such as drug, antibiotic and methicillin, and is mainly followed by nouns related to bacteria or material. In terms of frequency distribution, during the past 20 to 30 years, the frequency of N-resistant increases sharply in American English, which may well substitute for N-proof in the near future. In other English varieties such as Australian English and New Zealand English, due to geographical and sociocultural factors, the nominal stems collocating with these two suffixes sometimes display unique regional features. Lastly, in terms of suffix rivalry, this study further proves that the two mechanisms of type-blocking and token-blocking may well co-exist.
A Phonological Study of the Proper Names in the Glorious Qur'an and their English Counterparts
Arabic is one of the world’s largest languages, spoken natively by about 300 million speakers. It is by a large margin the largest language in Africa (nearly 200 million speakers), and one of the biggest in Asia (120 million). It has been estimated to be the fifth largest language in the world in terms of native speakers. Strength of numbers alone guarantees it communicative centrality in the world language system. This Handbook reflects the full breadth of research on Arabic Linguistics in the West, covering topics such as pidgins and creoles, Arabic second language acquisition, loanwords, Arabic dialects, codeswitching, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and Arabic lexicography. The Handbook brings together different approaches and scholarly traditions, an invitation to the reader to explore the many faceted world of Arabic Linguistics. The articles in this volume expertly explore the nature of the house of Arabic from many angles. Many argue for specific points of view, others give descriptions of synoptic breadth, while others provide exhaustive overviews of the state of the art. The parts may or may not come together to describe a common structure; they do provide blueprints for a better understanding of it.
Speakability in drama involves the level of ease with which an individual can coordinate the pronunciation, singing, and emotion of a text. In translations of classical Chinese operas, reproducing the speakability of the original can determine the success of the stage performance of the opera. However, speakability in such translations has not been explored in the literature. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the similarity of the speakability in translations of An Enchanting Dream 惊梦 from The Peony Pavilion 牡丹亭 to that of the original Chinese through a corpus-driven investigation of versions of the opera annotated by Xu Yuanchong and translated by Xu Yuanchong and Xu Ming, Wang Rongpei, and Cyril Birch. We developed a prosodic phonological evaluation system in which duration and pitch were used to compare the source text and target texts by using InterPhonic 5.0 and Praat software. The results indicated that for duration when the context and characterization in the drama are considered, Wang’s translation did not adequately convey emotions. For pitch, the tone ranges of Xu and Xu’s translation fluctuated more drastically, which more effectively conveyed the emotional changes of the original text. Furthermore, the waviness of the pitches in Xu and Xu’s translation was similar to that of the original text. In this study, relative corpora were developed to determine the translated speakability of a Chinese classical opera. Our results may be valuable to translation studies and for the dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.
How well have classic ideas on whole-word phonology stood the test of time? Waterson claimed that each child has a system of their own; Ferguson and Farwell emphasised the relative accuracy of first words; Menn noted the occurrence of regression and the emergence of phonological systematicity. This volume brings together classic texts such as these with current data-rich studies of British and American English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, French, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. This combination of classic and contemporary work from the last 30 years presents the reader with cutting-edge perspectives on child language by linking historical approaches with current ideas such as exemplar theory and usage-based phonology and contrasting state-of-the-art perspectives from developmental psychology and linguistics. This is a valuable resource for cognitive scientists, developmentalists, linguists, psychologists, speech scientists and therapists interested in understanding how children begin to use language without the benefit of language-specific innate knowledge.
This paper aims to provide a full diachronic account of the segmental correspondences between two extant Kawapanan languages of Peruvian Amazonia, Shawi and Shiwilu. I put forward a reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Kawapanan, which differs from the alternative proposal by Valenzuela (2011) in several respects: I argue that Proto-Kawapanan had two liquid phonemes (*ɾ and *l), lacked palatal obstruents, distinguished between two front vowels (*i and *ɪ), and its codas did not contrast for place of articulation. The second part of the paper is devoted to the reconstruction of the phonological history of Shawi and Shiwilu, including sound changes such as umlaut and several kinds of palatalization. I conclude with an attempt at reconstructing sound changes that must have taken place before the disintegration of Proto-Kawapanan, such as the debuccalization of pre-Proto-Kawapanan consonantal codas and the positionally conditioned lateralization of *ɾ.
In this chapter, we examine some conceptual issues in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). We first interpret the meaning of “systemic” and “functional”. We then examine the phases of development of SFL and comment on the different names of the theory in the course of its evolution. We also discuss the theoretical aspects of SFL, delineate the term “metafunction”, and introduce the multilingual version of Introduction to Functional Grammar, which Christian Matthiessen is developing. Finally, Halliday’s unfinished works on systemic functional theory and Halliday’s conventions of technical terms are introduced.
In this chapter, we first discuss Christian Matthiessen’s interest in studying language typology. Then we characterize systemic functional typology, relate language typology to its neighboring areas, recommend Christian Matthiessen’s descriptions of Akan lexicogrammar and phonology and investigate the way of interpreting Joseph Greenberg’s work from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics. We also provide some background information of Christian Matthiessen’s work and introduce some computational tools for studies in language typology. Finally, we examine some challenges for systemic functional typology, and suggest some ways of moving forward.
Stress is a seamless property of many human languages. The issue of stress in Arabic has been investigated by many linguists and orientalists who showed a remarkable variation in their arguments about the existence, assignment and role of stress in Arabic. Some non-Arab linguists detected stress factors in the Arabic language while others logically argued and rejected the presence of stress in Arabic. This paper revisits this hotly debated issue and presents it from different theoretical and practical perspectives with a goal to provide a unified critique on all the surveyed perspectives.
This article first presents a historical section showing the importance of alliterations and assonances in French literature, but also that of musical figuralism. Alliterations and assonances are characterized by the repetition of consonants or vowels, encouraging to any pedagogical pronunciation activity: they improve memorization, comprehension, and pronunciation. After this first section, a selection of several literary texts, some of which are set to music, is proposed, for their pedagogical use in improving the pronunciation of French as a foreign language: opening towards a fine perception of foreign sounds and pronunciation games, the work of diction and the access to a pleasure of speaking, help concerning some specific pronunciation errors (continuity of fricatives without affricates production, distinction between unvoiced and voiced plosives, sonorous consonants /lmnr/ and distinction between /r/ and /l/), "articulatory figuralism".
Trata-se do capítulo 3 de Simultaneous structure in phonology, composto de seis capítulos: (1) Gesto, traços e autossegmentos, (2) Fonética na fonologia, (3) Definindo prosódia, (4) Modulações, (5) Sobre a dualidade da padronização e (6) Eventos fonológicos (segmentação, eventos simultâneos e paralelos).
Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen was a long-time collaborator and close friend of M. A. K. Halliday, and has co-authored various books with him, some of which have not yet been published. In this interview, he describes Halliday’s wide-ranging linguistic interests, provides details of Halliday’s time in China, discusses the influences of J. R. Firth and Karl Marx on Halliday, reflects on the development of Halliday’s theories, and describes Halliday’s contributions to phonetics, phonology and typology.
The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics - edited by Geoff Thompson May 2019
Cambridge Core - Discourse Analysis - The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics - edited by Geoff Thompson
Onomatopoeia are disproportionately high in number in infants’ early words compared to adult language. Studies of infant language perception have proposed an iconic advantage for onomatopoeia, which may make them easier for infants to learn. This study analyses infants’ early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in early acquisition. Cross-linguistic evidence from 16 infants demonstrates how these forms fit within a phonologically-systematic developing lexicon. We observe a predominance of consonant harmony and open cv syllables in infants’ early words—structures that are typical of onomatopoeia across languages. Infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia is shown to be driven by a preference for structures that are easy to plan and produce. These data present an original perspective on onomatopoeia in early development, highlighting the role of production in language acquisition in general, and onomatopoeic words in particular.
The aim of this study is two-fold. First, it contributes to the scholarship on phonological HARMONY systems in West African languages (e.g. Goldsmith 1990; Saanchi 1997; Casali, 2012; Hudu 2013; Kuubezelle & Akanlig-pare 2017; see also Rose & Walker 2011 for a typology of HARMONY systems), focusing on the Lobr dialect of Dagaare (henceforth, Dagaare) as a case study. Second, it examines the interface between grammar and phonology, showing how phonology reorganises aspectual meaning in Dagaare lexicogrammar into a meaningful prosody of sounds (see Appendix I). The study, specifically, shows that the imperfective aspect in Dagaare is realized morphophonologically by vowel, consonant and vowel-consonant HARMONY systems. The study draws insights from Firthian phonology (e.g. Firth 1948) and its further development in systemic phonology (cf. Halliday 1967; Matthiessen 1987; Tench 1992; Halliday & Greaves 2006) to account for this realization. From this theoretical perspective, I analyse HARMONY in Dagaare from both syntagmatic and paradigmatic points of view. Syntagmatically, harmonious sounds are considered as a structure of sounds occurring in ‘an order of mutual expectancy’ (Firth 1962: 17, 30). Paradigmatically, different types of harmony are identified and set up as a system of paradigmatic values for the realisation of the imperfective in Dagaare. Here, harmony is analysed as a feature of a phonological unit larger than the segment (instead of a feature of a single segment spreading to or assimilating other segments), and for Dagaare this unit is the phonological word. That is, the [word] serves as the point of origin for the system of HARMONY.
The dissertation is devoted to the study of the vowel system of an Arabic variety spoken in the major urban centers in northern Egypt, known under the generic term “Egyptian Arabic.” The first common thread that runs through all chapters of the dissertation is to establish descriptive generalizations on issues that have not yet received the proper attention, descriptions that constitute true linguistic generalizations of a type likely to feed theoretical elaboration. New relevant information will be cited and a detailed analysis of a comprehensive fragment of fresh data using analytical tools different from those previously used by my predecessors will be offered. The main argument of the dissertation is that the key to the interpretation of the most prominent vowel-related events in this language lies in the interdependence of vowel quality and vowel quantity. I establish a transparent relationship between these two, only phonologically long vowels in Egyptian Arabic can maintain their quality on the phonetic level, otherwise they become incapable of surfacing. They are, in this case, phonetically replaced either by an epenthetic vowel or by nothing at all. I thus construe vowel length in strictly phonological terms. The establishment of the new construal of vowel length in Egyptian Arabic was also made possible through comparison with other varieties of Arabic whose diachrony and parameters are relatively well understood, namely Classical Arabic and the Arabic spoken in the Maghreb. With the proliferation of valuable research on contemporary varieties of spoken Arabic, the prospect of defining the parameters responsible for the identification and stabilization of each language or dialect, appears to be within reach. This is the other common thread running through the dissertation. The dissertation in this respect contributes to the enhancement of the study of Arabic dialectology. But, my ultimate goal is to give a deductive structure to my results and to draw conclusions that can go beyond the case of Egyptian Arabic or Arabic dialectology, indeed to contribute to the elaboration of Linguistic Theory.
Este ensaio apresenta uma abordagem interdisciplinar que reúne a música e a linguística e entende a entoação, como uma sequência de tons, iguais ou diferentes, produzidos pela voz durante a fala. Trubetzkoy propôs que a sintaxe se relacionasse diretamente com a variação de frequência atuando com função conclusiva, de continuidade e enumerativa. Para ele a entoação seria função direta das variações globais de frequência de F0. A relação entre tom médio dessas variações globais de F0 e o tom final concludente de sentença seguiria, desse ponto de vista, o mesmo princípio das modalizações formadoras de uma melodia e de sua tendência à conclusão no tom fundamental sujeitando-se ao mesmo princípio de resolução melódica da cadência perfeita baseada na escala de Zarlino. A definição dessa sequência harmônica — D7 > T — enfatizou a noção de centro tonal desenvolvido por Rameau e inaugurou a música tonal. Esse fato foi avassalador na chamada música ocidental e a música modal, que não se valia da escala de Zarlino, nem da cadência perfeita de Rameau, acabou restrita a algumas manifestações quase fossilizadas, na forma de cantos folclóricos ou cantos religiosos. Tomando algumas análises comparativas dessas finalizações, foi possível verificar que sujeitos brasileiros, portugueses e guaranis realizaram finalizações plagais. Finalizações autênticas, entretanto, concentraram-se em sujeitos com alta escolaridade, o que apontou para uma caracterização mais específica da fala escolarizada em relação à não escolarizada. Apesar de os dados analisados de finalização frasal não apresentarem resultados concludentes quanto à relação da música ocidental e às finalizações frasais nas falas respectivas, a utilização dos modelos teóricos da musicologia mostrou-se extremamente profícua para a análise da entoação frasal, o que incentiva a interdisciplinaridade como uma alternativa viável para a análise linguística.
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