Intonation has frequently been regarded by linguists as on the periphery of linguistics. The study of grammar began in the classical era (see Robins 1967) and the study of phonetics also goes back a very long way (see, for example, Allen 1953). But intonation has not figured prominently in phonetic writings (if we exclude discussion of word phenomena like Greek accent). Most bibliographies of intonation do not go further back than the twentieth century (e.g. Ladd 1979a), two exceptions being Pike (1945) and Crystal (1969). But there are sufficient early writings on various aspects of intonation to justify a new sub-branch of the history of linguistics, the history of intonology. This article seeks to inaugurate this sub-branch by tracing the origins of a central theoretical concept in modern intonation back to the seventeenth century and ultimately to the renaissance.

In this paper we will discuss some phonetic differences that are found in the production of diphthongs. The study is of a limited scope and may be considered a pilot study. The kinds of questions that will be addressed have to do with the specification of timing in speech production. Are the vowel elements of diphthongs joined in language-specific ways, or can they be joined by more general principles, such as the assumption of a fairly constant transition duration, so that the transition rate will be faster if the distance between onset - and offset - vowels is greater? This kind of principle was proposed by Kent and Moll (1972) for some types of vowel-to-vowel sequences. Or does the duration of the transition lengthen as the distance of the transition increases, keeping the transition rate fairly constant? If any of these principles are at work, then their effects will show up acoustically in the transition duration, particularly of F2. If the Kent and Moll principle is applicable, it would for example operate as a tendency towards similar F2 transition durations in different languages for the ‘same’ diphthongs.

A fundamentally important practice in phonetics is the analysis of continuous speech into a sequence of discrete segments. There has been considerable debate about the theoretical validity of this practice within classical auditory/kinaesthetic phonetics and in phonology as well as in the context of the acoustic analysis of speech; in recent years the issue has become more widely important as research work in automatic speech processing has resulted in computer algorithms for segmenting speech and assigning phonetic labels to the segments. Work on the automatic segmentation and labeling of speech sounds has been carried on in our department since 1980. This paper begins by examining the theoretical issues involved in segmentation and labeling, then describes our own work.

The following errata appeared in the Journal, volume 19.2:

p.79 Last line omitted in printing. Last line should read: [ɹ]. Unstressed [ə[ is higher than stressed [ə].

p.80 In both charts the symbol [ɷ] should be [ʊ].

p.97 Paragraph 3, penultimate line: delete ‘n’ between ‘et’ and ‘le’

Paragraph 4, line 3, delete comma between ‘conservant’ and ‘une’