In this article, I will argue for the use of the epsilon symbol in the lexical dress set (which includes words like step, ready, said, shelf etc.) for RP. The need for this paper arises from the fact that many, but by no means all, dictionaries and linguistic treatises employ the [ē] symbol and that this symbol is neither the most accurate nor a particularly useful one, especially for foreign learners of English. An examination of current usage and its historical rationale (or lack thereof) is followed by articulatory and perceptual evidence for the dress vowel being close to the third cardinal vowel, more practical arguments, and a discussion of the issues raised.

This study investigates some acoustic characteristics of Norwegian /ç/ and /[small Esh]/ as spoken by two groups of young people. Whereas the first group distinguished between the two fricatives in production, the other speakers showed articulatory merging, producing both /ç/ and /[small Esh]/ as [[small Esh]]. Parameters measured were duration and relative rms amplitude of the fricative and four spectral properties, viz. lower and upper edge and peak frequency, as well as centre of gravity. The results show that the two fricatives are mainly distinguished by their spectral properties. For younger speakers with a merged pronunciation, merging is not fully completed.

Although Spanish is a relatively unified language, in the sense that people from very distant locations manage to understand each other well, there are several phonetic phenomena that distinguish geographically separated varieties. The total number of native speakers of Spanish is above 400 million, and roughly 10% of them live in Argentina (Instituto Cervantes 2014). The accent described below corresponds to formal Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, and the main allophones are indicated by parentheses in the Consonant Table. The recordings are from a 49-year-old college-educated male speaker, who has lived all his life in either the city of Buenos Aires or the province of Buenos Aires.

There is widespread, immediate and enduring demand for high quality, natural, intelligible synthetic female voices in the expanding speech technology industry. Yet synthetic female voices are scarce, both in parametric text-to-speech (TTS) systems and in concatenative ones. Current female synthetic speech largely lacks naturalness, pleasantness and tolerability. Some acoustic specifications of female voices that are relevant to synthesis are discussed in detail. Recent research pertaining to female voice quality is reported and a ranking of these various considerations is proposed. This paper reviews the present situation and considers why there is a paucity of female voice synthesis.

Esling (1990) reports on the computer coding of the IPA as amended to 1989. The coding system consists of three-digit numbers, divided into groups for consonants, vowels, and diacritics by the first digit. The set of coding numbers in the series 6nn was reserved for the symbols for voice quality and pathological speech listed in the Extensions to the IPA drawn up by the Group working on these symbols at the Kiel IPA Convention.

Most intonation analysts would consider it a truism to insist that any model of the formal properties of a language's intonation system has to be relativistic in character. By this one would mean that the linguistic constants in the system are the contrasts between the features involved (pitch, loudness, or whatever) and not the values of the features themselves, as defined in any absolute, physical way. The point hardly needs quotation to support it, but it will be useful to refer to one person's formulation of the relativity claim as a reminder of how the position is typically presented. Abercrombie, for example, says (1967: 107):

It is common knowledge that when one language borrows from another, the borrower often would incorporate the loan words into its phonological system by substituting ‘alien’ sounds by those from its own stock, breaking up consonant clusters to conform to its syllable structure and so on. In general it is not impossible to predict fairly accurately what a loan word would sound like in a language if one is familiar with the phonological systems of the lender and borrower. However, syllable structure and segments are just part of the picture. Other considerations like stress and tone would also be important if one is dealing with a stress language or a tone lauguage. The aim of this paper is to examine English loan forms in Cantonese in order to discover what happens when words from a stress language like English are borrowed into a tone language like Cantonese.

The impetus for this special issue was an all-day event at the 2015 meeting of the International Pragmatics Association: The Panel on Prosodic Constructions in Dialog. This event had several motivations: (i) we have enormous data sets and tools to process them, but as a field we lack clear roadmaps for how to exploit these sets and tools to improve our understanding; (ii) we know that prosody is more than just the single stream of intonation, but we find it hard to accurately describe multistream phenomena; (iii) we have observed how prosody serves many dialog and interactional functions, but cannot yet really model how; and (iv) we have various schools of thought, each wielding its own methods, but we have difficulty reconciling and connecting their various insights.

Lusoga is an interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda in the region of Busoga, which is surrounded by the Victoria Nile in the west, Lake Kyoga in the north, the River Mpologoma in the east and Lake Victoria in the south. According to the 2002 census, this language is spoken by slightly over two million people (UBOS 2006: 12).

Kazakh (ISO 639-3, kaz) is a Kipchak (Northwestern) Turkic language with approximately ten million speakers (Muhamedowa 2015). While the majority of Kazakh speakers live in the Republic of Kazakhstan, significant Kazakh-speaking populations exist throughout Central Asia. See Figure 1 for a map of the region. Kazakh spoken in Kazakhstan is described as having three or four dialects, but many researchers agree that differences between dialects are small and largely lexical (Kara 2002, Grenoble 2003, Muhamedowa 2015; see Amanzholov 1959 for more on Kazakh dialects).

Mbarrumbathama is a clan-named variety of Lamalama, a language of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Together with Umbuygamu (Ogilvie 1994, Sommer 1998, Verstraete 2017) and Rimanggudinhma (Godman 1993), Lamalama forms the Lamalamic subgroup of Paman languages (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997, Verstraete 2018), themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). The language is no longer spoken, but it is traditionally associated with about 20 clans (as reconstructed by Rigsby 1999, 2014) belonging to the southern shores of Princess Charlotte Bay, on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula (see Figure 1). The clans’ estates are mainly coastal, extending from the Normanby River mouth in the east to about 10 km west of the North Kennedy River mouth, but they also include some inland estates (see Rigsby 1992: 356).

The production of an ejective fricative involves an aerodynamic dilemma. An ejective requires increased intraoral air pressure, while a fricative requires air to be continuously vented through a narrow constriction. This venting may defeat the pressure increase. Because ejectivity is realized by forming a complete oral closure, we hypothesize that complete closure (i.e. affrication) may also typify ejective fricatives in some languages. We test this hypothesis through an acoustic production experiment with speakers of Tigrinya. We find substantial evidence that Tigrinya /s’/ is commonly realized as [ts’] and comment on the plausibility of affrication as a general strategy for the realization of ejective fricatives.

A topic that was not discussed at the 1989 Kiel convention was the phonetic specification of [h]. Judging by its current place on the chart it appears to be a voiceless glottal fricative. But this is a misnomer, in that most forms of [h] have very little friction at the glottis. The vocal cords are apart and any turbulent airflow that there might be is due to what Pike (1943) calls “cavity friction” rather than local friction at a particular point, [h] has no more friction at the glottis than [f] or any other voiceless sound with a comparable airflow.

In a previous article (Kenning, 1979) I presented a description of French intonation within a similar framework to that used by Halliday (1967, 1970) and El-Menoufy (1969) in their studies of English intonation. In the present paper I want to compare English and French with regard to the third set of choices recognized by the studies: TONAL choices. After a few general remarks I shall discuss first the shapes and meanings of the formal categories called tones, then the way in which these categories are expounded phonetically.

This paper reports an automatic data-driven analysis for describing prototypical intonation patterns, particularly suitable for initial stages of prosodic research and language description. The approach has several advantages over traditional ways to investigate intonation, such as the applicability to spontaneous speech, language- and domain-independency, and the potential of revealing meaningful functions of intonation. These features make the approach particularly useful for language documentation, where the description of prosody is often lacking. The core of this approach is a cluster analysis on a time-series of f0 measurements and consists of two scripts (Praat and R, available from https://constantijnkaland.github.io/contourclustering/). Graphical user interfaces can be used to perform the analyses on collected data ranging from spontaneous to highly controlled speech. There is limited need for manual annotation prior to analysis and speaker variability can be accounted for. After cluster analysis, Praat textgrids can be generated with the cluster number annotated for each individual contour. Although further confirmatory analysis is still required, the outcomes provide useful and unbiased directions for any investigation of prototypical f0 contours based on their acoustic form.

Nafsan (ISO 639-3: erk, Glottocode: sout2856), also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu. It is spoken in Erakor, Eratap and Pango, three villages situated along the southern coast of the island of Efate (Figure 1) (Clark 1985, Lynch 2000, Thieberger 2006). Nafsan is also closely related to Eton, Lelepa, Nakanamanga and Namakura, spoken further to the north on Efate and some smaller neighbouring islands.1 Nafsan is often described as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu group of languages, and the Nafsan and Eton-speaking communities are noted to be at the core of ‘an unmistakable area of innovation’ compared to their northern neighbours (Clark 1985: 25). Though crosslinguistic comparisons suggest a clear boundary between North-Central Vanuatu languages and languages of the Southern Vanuatu group, there is evidence that Nafsan speakers have both linguistic and cultural links to the southern islands, suggestive of complex historical relationships between the populations of the central and southern regions (Lynch 2004; Thieberger 2007, 2015). In terms of the sound system, Nafsan is noted to be of particular interest because it ‘forms a transition between the phonologically more conservative languages to the north and the more “aberrant” languages to the south’ (Lynch 2000: 320), and exhibits phonotactic patterns which are complex and typologically uncommon, particularly among Oceanic languages (Thieberger 2006).

The photographic production of scientific publications is on the increase. Consequently manuscripts which are fit for reproduction in this manner are necessary. Phonetic and linguistic papers often call for a mixed script, i.e. both the typemes of one (or more than one) language and the transcription symbols (phonetic and phonemic) are used. The preparation of a typescript of this sort is laborious even with the aid of a phonetic tandem-typewriter.