Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T07:50:00.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - The Delta programming language: an integrated approach to nonlinear phonology, phonetics, and speech synthesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2010

John Kingston
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Mary E. Beckman
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Get access

Summary

Brief overview

The Delta programming language is designed for formalizing and testing phonological and phonetic theories. Its central data structure lets linguists represent utterances as multiple “streams” of synchronized units of their choice, giving them considerable flexibility in expressing the relationship between phonological and phonetic units. This paper presents Version 2 of the Delta language, showing how it can be applied to two linguistic models, one for Bambara tone and fundamental frequency patterns and one for English formant patterns. While Delta is a powerful, special-purpose language that alone should serve the needs of most phonologists, phoneticians, and linguistics students who wish to test their rules, the Delta System also provides the flexibility of a general-purpose language by letting users intermingle C programming language statements with Delta statements.

Introduction

Despite their common interest in studying the sounds of human language, the fields of phonology and phonetics have developed largely independently in recent years. One of the contributing factors to this unfortunate division has been the lack of linguistic rule development systems. Such systems are needed to let linguists easily express utterance representations and rules, and facilitate the computational implementation and testing of phonological and phonetic models.

SRS (Hertz 1982) is a rule development system that was designed, starting in 1974, for just this purpose – to let linguists easily test phonological and phonetic rules, and explore the interface between phonology and phonetics through speech synthesis. SRS, however, was influenced quite heavily by the theory of generative phonology that was prevalent at the time, a theory that posited linear utterance representations consisting of a sequence of phoneme-sized segments represented as bundles of features (Chomsky and Halle 1968).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×