Theories of speech articulation planning must account for the coordinated movements of speech articulators that produce contrastive lexical items, as well as the ways these vary systematically in different contexts both within and across utterances. The systematic phonetic variability of phonologically equivalent forms relates to many factors including adjacent segmental context, rate and style of speech, local contextual factors, such as position in prosodic structure. This variability has been proposed to contribute to the transmission of meaning and to communicative efficiency.
Theories proposed to account for speech articulation behaviors differ in many key respects. Theoretical controversies relate to the nature of phonological representations used to distinguish words in the mental lexicon, as well as the processing components, representations, and mechanisms involved in planning and producing speech.
One of the most fundamental theoretical distinctions relates to assumptions about the spatiotemporal vs. symbolic nature of phonological representations. Distinctions in system architecture, including the number and type of processing components, derive from these assumptions. Other differences among theories relate to assumptions about the nature of speech production goals, movement targets, timekeeping mechanisms, dynamic parametric models of movement, movement coordination, the separate vs. integrated representation for spatial and temporal characteristics of movement, as well as proposed mechanisms to account for systematic phonetic variability in different contexts (coupled oscillators, optimization-based, vs. dynamic field theory approaches).
Article
Theoretical Issues in Planning the Articulation of Spoken Utterances
Alice Turk
Article
Phonetics of Fricatives
Allard Jongman
Fricatives are very common, occurring in over 90% of the world’s documented languages and at all places of articulation codified in the International Phonetic Alphabet charts. Fricatives constitute a class of consonant sounds characterized by a turbulent airflow produced by a severe but not complete constriction of the vocal tract. This constriction divides the vocal tract into two parts, a front cavity that ranges from the constriction to the lips and a back cavity that ranges from the constriction to the larynx. For anterior fricatives, the friction generated at the constriction excites the front cavity and the resonances associated with the front cavity dominate the sound spectrum. The length of the front cavity is a major determinant of the spectrum. As the location of the constriction moves toward the back of the vocal tract, the front cavity becomes longer, and the resonances occur at lower frequencies. For more posterior fricatives produced at and beyond the velum, back cavity resonances become more prominent.
Acoustic and perceptual studies focusing on the frication noise show that properties of the spectrum, amplitude, and duration of the noise all serve to distinguish the sibilant from the non-sibilant fricatives across a wide variety of languages. In addition, spectral properties distinguish /s/ from /ʃ/, with /s/ having a concentration of energy in higher frequencies than /ʃ/. None of the noise properties seem adequate to distinguish /f/ from /θ/. Acoustic and perceptual studies of fricative-to-vowel formant transitions suggest that transitions may provide unique information for those contrasts that are difficult to distinguish on the basis of the frication itself.
Fricatives, especially /s/ and /ʃ/, have also been shown to carry information about social-group membership, including speakers’ sexual orientation and social class.
Measures such as spectral moments can be sensitive to differences in sampling rate and type and exact location of the analysis window. Methods to obtain reliable measurements are discussed, including ensemble averaging and multitaper analysis. In addition, alternatives to spectral moments such as the Discrete Cosine Transformation coefficients are introduced.
Article
Phonetics of Tone (African Languages)
Scott Myers
Most of the languages of Africa are tone languages, and the distribution of tones in these languages is often integrated into the morphology and syntax. Descriptions of tone in African languages have been influential in the development of linguistic approaches to tone and in particular autosegmental representations. But almost all of those descriptions are based on phonetic transcriptions, which are subjective and imprecise. Experimental phonetic investigations, based on objective measurements and quantitative analysis, have given new insight into old issues in this area.
Phonetic research on tone is concerned with how tones relate to fundamental frequency (f0), what factors affect that relation, how tones are produced, and how listeners recognize tone categories. Such research on African tone languages has provided significant information about how tone categories can differ in f0 contour. It has yielded evidence about downdrift and downstep, two notions derived from the study of these languages. It has shown how intonation can work in a language in which tone is used to distinguish words. It has shed light on how tones can be realized in the face of interruptions of modal voicing. The small but growing body of experimental work on tone in African tone languages is significant because these languages make up a good proportion of the tone languages in the world, and because tone patterns in these languages have shaped how linguists look at tone.
Article
A Survey of Morpho-Phonology in Chinese Languages
Xiaopei Wang and Bing Li
The majority of morphemes are assigned a tone in Chinese languages. Tone fulfills the equivalent function as consonant and vowel phonemes. In Chinese, tonology interacts with morphology in two ways. First, in concatenative morphology, wherein morphemes or words are combined to form new words, tones in adjacent positions may affect each other and tone sandhi occurs. Tone sandhi rules display a high degree of sensitivity to morpho-syntax in many Chinese languages. Different types of tone sandhi take place in different construction types in one single language. A common tendency observed is that tone sandhi rules generally fall into two types, depending on the structural relation held between two subcomponents of a disyllabic structure (either a word or a phrase). One type demonstrates the lexical syndrome in that it applies merely in words of cohesion, including suffixed words, disyllabic compounds of the coordinate or modifier-head structure. In contrast, the other type applies in less cohesive constructions, such as words and phrases of the verb-object or subject-predicate structure. The sensitivity of tone sandhi to morpho-syntax across Chinese is of theoretical significance for understanding the overall organization of the grammar in general and the interaction between phonology and morpho-syntax in particular.
On the other hand, the special property of tone being superimposed on syllables enables it to act as a floating entity to convey grammatical or semantic meanings. In order to be phonologically licensed, the floating morphemic tone usually anchors on the stem. A rich body of morphemic tones are reported across Chinese languages, and their theoretical significance awaits further exploration.
Article
Vowel Length in the Romance Languages
Michele Loporcaro
This article classifies all the Romance languages and dialects with regard to the phonological property of vowel length, phonemic and allophonic, considering its relationship to its correlate in phonetic substance, namely vocoid duration. It examines the rise and fall of vowel length in Romance, starting with a reference to Latin, where vowel length was contrastive as was consonant length, while in the Latin-Romance transition the former became dependent on the latter, as a part of a syllable structure conditioning. Consequently, Proto-Romance can be reconstructed as featuring an allophonic rule that lengthens stressed vowels in non-final open syllables (short, OSL) identical to that operating today in standard Italian, all Italo-Romance dialects south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, and Sardinian, which I will label type A languages. Due to a series of later changes, the remaining Romance languages and dialects lost this allophonic rule, which gave rise to either of the two further types: on the one hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination and contrastive vowel length (type B, including Daco- and Ibero-Romance all along their documented history, as well as, today, most of Gallo-Romance); and, on the other hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination but displaying contrastively long versus short vowels (type C, including most of northern Italo-Romance as well as part of Raeto- and Gallo-Romance, but which arguably stretched from the Apennines to the North Sea in the Middle Ages).
This article examines all relevant sources of evidence, from Latin epigraphic inscriptions to experimental phonetic measurements, showing that they all chime perfectly with the picture just outlined. Needless to say, while the data from modern languages and dialects are observational, and those from older stages delivered by the written record need interpretation, reconstruction is, by definition, constructional: It can be supported by several sources of evidence but is in itself always provisional. Therefore, the story to be told here must be considered the best approximation to the historical truth that the present author deems reconstructible based on the available evidence.
Article
The Descriptive Tradition in Chinese Phonetics
Fang Hu
Even though the study of speech sounds has a long history in China, Chinese linguistics occurred as a modern discipline under the Western influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bernhard Karlgren and Yuen-ren Chao established a descriptive tradition in Chinese phonetics that was rooted in Chinese philology. The idea was to provide a new scientific way for the description of speech sounds in modern languages and dialects on the one hand, and to explain the development of the sounds in the history on the other. Chinese linguistics has henceforth adopted a pan-chronic approach. Phonetics and phonology are integral to the study of speech sounds, and synchronic and diachronic aspects are parts of linguistics. Chinese phonetics has a descriptive spirit, rather than being theory oriented. From the very beginning, Chinese phonetics has been developing toward an evidence-based, experimental approach. This is because in a descriptive tradition, phonetic diversities and phonological universals need to be explained not only by abstract rules or principles but also by physical substances.
One unique tradition of Chinese linguistics uses an active-articulator-based terminology for describing the place of articulation. The active-articulator-based terminology captures an anterior versus posterior distinction between apical articulations in Mandarin dialects. Meanwhile, it introduced confusion when the active-articulator-based terminology was used as a general framework. Linguistic contrasts of phonation and aspiration in consonants are of particular interest in Chinese linguistics because they are correlated with tonal developments. Wu dialects are rich in laryngeal distinction, and fine-grained phonetic details reveal how obstruent devoicing has been interweaving with tones.
Chinese vowels are featured by apical vowels and diphthongs. Apical vowels function as vowels in Chinese syllables, but there is a long debate on whether apical vowels are vowels or syllabic consonants. Accumulative evidence from both acoustic and articulatory studies shows that apical vowels are more vowel-like than consonant-like. Chinese dialects have complex inventories of diphthongs and triphthongs and even teraphthongs in a few rare cases. The nature of diphthong is essential to the understanding of the complexity of Chinese syllables. And there is a typological difference between falling and rising diphthongs in Chinese dialects. Falling diphthongs are a single articulatory event with a dynamic spectral target, while rising diphthongs are sequences of two spectral targets.
Article
Dutch
Freek Van de Velde
This chapter presents a bird's eye perspective on Dutch, taking a historical perspective. Indeed, many characteristics of Dutch can only be understood by diachronically tracing the origin and development of its phonology, morphology, and syntax. For phonology, the major trends are an increasing phonemic importance and proliferation of vowels, an erosion of the Auslaut, and a closing and diphthongization of long vowels. For grammar the trends can be summarized as a gradual loss of inflectional morphology, a concomitant rise in configurationality, and a gradual crystallization in fixed expressions. Both in its structure and in its development there is considerable overlap with drifts in the neighboring languages, and indeed, Dutch is often found to occupy an intermediate position between its West-Germanic neighbors, not only geographically, but ‘typologically’ as well. Dialect variation is mainly organized along a geographic east–west axis, linking up with Franconian-Ingvaeonic contacts in the Early Middle Ages.
Article
Endangered Chinese Dialects
Qingwen Zhang and Guanen Chen
Starting from an overview of the 10 major Chinese dialect groups, the article aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to endangered Chinese dialects. It delineates the causes and indicators of endangerment, describes the geographical distribution and speaking population of endangered dialects, and elucidates the influence of dominant languages on the linguistic traits of endangered dialects. The paper concludes with an exploration of ongoing preservation efforts dedicated to safeguarding endangered Chinese dialects.
The decrease in language use, influenced by the dominance of Mandarin and other dominant dialects, is identified as the primary cause of endangerment. The implementation of the language policy designating Mandarin as the standard national language to be used in education, administration, and public domains throughout the country has further contributed to this decline. Indicators of endangerment include decreased language use, bilingualism or multilingualism in dominant dialects, and limited domains of usage resulting in language shifting. The disruption of linguistic transmission from older to younger generations is another factor contributing to a diminishing population of speakers. Geographically, the largest cluster of endangered Chinese dialects is distributed at the junction of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hunan provinces. These dialects have a small population of speakers, ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands.
Linguistically, the impact of dominant dialects on endangered dialects pertains to their phonological, lexical, and grammatical properties. While phonological instability displayed due to the influence of dominant dialects, certain stable features are identified, such as the retention or development of Middle Chinese voiced stops and affricates, as well as the preservation of sharp sounds. Lexical properties of endangered dialects are discussed in two aspects: (a) distinctive words in endangered dialects, including dialect-specific words, ancient Chinese words, and those related to folk culture; (b) word order variation between the endangered dialect and its dominant dialect. The erosion of grammatical properties is also noted, with endangered dialects borrowing features from dominant dialects.
The article emphasizes the importance of preserving linguistic diversity and protecting endangered Chinese dialects. The National Language Resources Protection Project in China is introduced as a comprehensive initiative aimed at surveying, collecting, and recording language resources. The project includes the publication of books, symposia, and an online platform showcasing audio and video recordings of endangered dialects. However, a comprehensive approach that includes explicit language policies and the establishment of dialect-promoting institutions are necessary for comprehensive protection.
Article
Morphology of Determiners in the Romance Languages
Franck Floricic
The question of articles and definiteness has given rise to a great deal of work, whether from a theoretical, typological, historical, or other perspective. Given the breadth of the field, it would be unrealistic in a synthesis of this kind to go through all the work that has been done on this subject, some of which may be relatively old. We have therefore focused on a certain number of aspects which seemed relevant to us, taking into consideration dialectal data which are not often taken into account. Another difficulty of the undertaking is that the question of articles concerns various fields of investigation: syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. The focus of this contribution is therefore on the morphology of articles in Romance languages. After having sought to circumscribe the concept of determination, the origin and distribution of articles in a number of Romance varieties are described. Particular attention is paid to the phenomena of variation that manifest themselves at the phonomorphological level. The morpho-syntax of other kinds of determiners is discussed as well—demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessives. The question of the maintenance of case distinctions in the Romance determiners will also be addressed, as well as the discussed and intriguing question of lack of agreement within the noun phrase. Given their special status, it will be shown that personal and place names show particular constraints with respect to definite articles, due among other things to their historical genesis.
Article
Segmental Phonology, Phonotactics, and Syllable Structure in the Romance Languages
Stephan Schmid
From the perspective of phonological typology, the Romance languages exhibit considerable diversity, although they all originate from the same ancestor language, that is, “Vulgar Latin.” Most consonant inventories are of average size, with 20–23 phonemes, whereas typologically marked segments (e.g., palatal obstruents or retroflex consonants) only occur in a minority of Romance varieties. Instead, the number of vowel phonemes varies substantially, ranging from 5 in Spanish to 16 in French (which features front rounded vowels and nasal vowels). Substantial differences also exist regarding the treatment of unstressed vowels, which are subject to various degrees of reduction—including their deletion in both diachrony and synchrony. Consequently, such phonological processes yield various degrees of phonotactic complexity: While most Romance varieties are commonly counted among the so-called syllable languages, with a strong preference for open syllables and relatively simple consonant clusters ordered along the sonority scale, some dialects depart from this general tendency, allowing complex consonant clusters that may also run against the sonority sequencing generalization.
