It has been observed by many writers on English phonetics that /p/, /t/, /k/ and /tʃ/ are frequently glottalized, i.e. produced with closed glottis. This observation raises a variety of interesting questions. Firstly, the phonological environments in which glottalization occurs have yet to be satisfactorily described; a preliminary attempt at a re-statement was made in Roach (1973) and a fuller account presented in Roach (1978). Secondly, it is of interest to study the articulatory mechanisms used in the production of glottalization, both from the point of view of finding out more about how laryngeal closures in speech are produced, and also with respect to the temporal organization of the laryngeal and supralaryngeal closures. Thirdly, since the incidence of glottalization (and of the closely related phenomenon of glottal replacement) appears to vary according to geographical and social factors, age and sex, it is of interest in dialectological and sociolinguistic studies of English. Finally, in a wider context, glottalization may be studied as being potentially an on-going sound change in English, and as a phenomenon that might possibly be linked with similar laryngeal articulations in other languages, e.g. the stød of Standard Danish and of West Jutland Danish.

Informants recorded a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, adapted from the North German Variety in the I.P.A. Principles (1973). The German text was rewritten with considerable emphasis on lexical differences, and only slightly less emphasis on morphological and syntactic differences, especially word order. Words such as Wanderer in High German (hereinafter H.G.) were regarded as ‘non-Bavarian’ by native speakers and virtually all examples of the imperfect tense were changed to the perfect tense. It is usual in this dialect, which is normally known as Upper Bavarian (hereinafter U.B.), for personal pronouns to follow verb forms, as a result of which they are very rarely stressed.

French intonation has so far received far less attention from linguists than English intonation. What is available on the subject tends to deal with specific issues and is usually based on read prose rather than on spontaneous speech. The aim of this paper is to provide an overall picture of the intonation of ‘standard’ conversational French so that the intonational resources of French may be compared with those of English. The primary data consists of about one hour of recorded conversations; the contrasts have been identified using auditory techniques and the accuracy of the transcription and reliability of the descriptive statements have been checked by analysing the corpus instrumentally with a mingograf.

In February 1977, at the age of 54, I was admitted to hospital suffering from acute supraventricular tachycardia. The attack had perhaps been brought on iatrogenically, by side effects of medication for raised diastolic blood pressure. Four days later, while still in hospital, I suffered a cerebro-vascular accident (stroke) causing a left hemiplegia which resulted in total dysphagia and dysarthria as the most notable symptoms.