The article analyses violations of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) above the word level in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language, by investigating the realization of adjacent lexical high tones across word boundaries. The results show that across word boundaries downstep (i.e. a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones) only takes place within a phonological phrase. A phonological phrase break blocks downstep, even when the necessary tonal configuration is met. A phrase-based account is adopted in order to account for the occurrence of downstep. Our study confirms a pattern previously reported for the closely related language Southern Sotho and provides controlled, empirical data from Tswana, based on read speech of twelve speakers which has been analysed auditorily by two annotators as well as acoustically.

The history is outlined of the origins and development, during the earlier twentieth century from the work of H. E. Palmer and A. S. Hornby, of a highly distinctive type of dictionary designed to meet the needs of non-native-speaking students of English. It was distinguished by its inclusion of various phonetic and grammatical matters previously almost entirely neglected. In doing so it made a major contribution to the remedying of deficiencies in our records of the English language in respect of the rhythmical characteristics of lexical items longer than the uncompounded word. Other phonetic aspects of these dictionaries are dealt with, including the arrival of related recorded spoken pronunciations.

The pitch realisations of the accentual systems in Osaka Japanese (OJ) and Kagoshima Japanese (KJ) have been auditorily described in detail, and analysed within various phonological frameworks. However, little linguistic-phonetic descriptive research has been undertaken on the accent types of Japanese dialects in such a way as to enable a cross-dialectal comparison of their acoustic realisation. In this study, linguistic-tonetic representations of OJ and KJ tonalities are derived from normalised acoustic representations for pitch patterns conventionally described as LH, LHL, LLH and LLLH. A comparison of these representations across the two dialects demonstrates some significant differences in the acoustic realisation of the H/L units. The implications of these observed differences for surface tonal representation of KJ within Autosegmental-Metrical theory are also explored.

In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German.

Ideally, we want to be able to state authoritatively which of the IPA's stipulations meet with acceptance, which are regarded as controversial, and which appear to have failed to make any impact at all. Account will have to be taken of the work not only of phoneticians, but also of colleagues in any discipline which uses phonetic terminology and notation.

Saterland Frisian (Sfrs. Seeltersk) is the only living remnant of Old East Frisian. It is an endangered language, with an estimated number of 2250 speakers (Stellmacher 1998: 27) and is spoken in the municipality of the Saterland (Sfrs. Seelterlound), which is located in the federal state of Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.

This paper provides an acoustic description of /z/ and /zʕ/ in Tŝilhqot’in (Northern Dene). These sounds are noted by Cook (1993, 2013) to show lenition and some degree of laterality in coda position. Based on recordings made in 2014 with a single, mother-tongue speaker of Tŝilhqot’in, we describe their acoustic properties and examine their distribution as a function of prosodic position and segmental environment. We find that they vary along three dimensions: manner (fricative–approximant), degree of retraction (non-retracted–retracted), and laterality (non-lateral–lateral). In addition, some tokens have a characteristic ‘buzziness’, which has been associated with the Chinese front apical vowel (Shao & Ridouane 2018, 2019) and the Swedish ‘Viby-i’ (Westberger 2019). We argue that ‘lenition’ (Kirchner 2004, Ennever, Meakins & Round 2017) can only account for some of the observed variation and suggest that both /z/ and /zʕ/ are specified for two tongue articulations: tongue tip/blade and tongue body (Laver 1994), encompassing laterality (and concomitant retraction) in addition to the primary coronal gesture.

Two words in present-day Hungarian, the conjunction tehát ‘that is’ and ‘consequently’ and the pronoun ilyen ‘like this’ seem to be undergoing a functional change, acquiring the function of fillers, while retaining their former lexical function, too. Twenty narratives were drawn from the Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Corpus (BEA), to analyze the acoustic-phonetic patterns of these words. Both words showed significant differences in duration depending on function. The first and second formant values of the conjunction tehát showed significant differences depending on whether it was used as a filler or in its original function as a conjunction. The formants of the stressed vowel in the pronoun ilyen did not show any differences with either males or females, but the second formant of the unstressed vowel, depending on function, showed significant variations with male subjects. Apparently, females make an unconscious distinction between the two functions only by varying the time structure of the word. Our data confirmed that these words are indeed undergoing a functional change, which is manifested in changes of their temporal patterns and, to some extent, in the articulation of their vowels.

Assimilation phenomena involving lexical alveolars and velars are examined in a Stockport accent. It is suggested that the segment is too narrow a domain of investigation for clues to the differentiation of pairs such as leg kept and lead kept. The vowels either side of the consonantal sequence are involved in any kind of assimilation process that takes place, in many cases producing slight differences in dorsal contact between the alveolars and the velars.

The aim of this paper is to discuss certain non-obvious assimilation processes which take place at word boundaries. They are ‘non-obvious’ because it appears that the assimilation changes are not necessarily complete, i.e. rules apply partially producing transition segments which have some features of the original segment and some of the one which triggers off assimilation. This phenomenon is given the name FEATURE INVASION and is illustrated primarily by Polish examples and marginally by examples from English RP.

The susceptibility of nasals to devoicing in certain contexts did not escape the notice of the auditorally oriented early phoneticians and is included in many of the rigorous descriptions in the classic phonetics handbooks:

Sievers (1901: 169) remarks generally of sonorants: ‘Ist der Sonorlaut aber unsilbisch, so wird er durch den stimmlosen Nachbarlaut häufig ebenfalls stimmlos gemacht, wenigstens setzt bei Verbindungen wie sla, sna die Stimme oft erst nach der Einstellung des Mundes für l, n etc. ein, so daß der Eingang des l, n noch stimmlos gebildet wird’.

This paper aims at describing the click accompaniments of |Gui, a little known Central Khoisan language, and presenting some new findings which may contribute to general phonetics as well as Khoisan linguistics. The phonetic features described here are based upon linguistic field research by the author into the |Gui language in the Xade area, Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, from August to December in 1992, from August to October in 1993 and from August to December in 1994.

Tous les efforts qui se sont poursuivis depuis le début de ce siècle pour tenter de simplifier l'orthographe du français ont paru sombrer dans l'indifférence générale et se solder par autant d'échecs. On pourrait donc croire que les Français et les francophones en général sont satisfaits de leur orthographe ou qu'en tout cas, ils ne désirent pas que soit reposé le problème de la graphie de leur langue. Or, il semble bien qu'il n'en soit rien. Si l'opinion publique, inconsciente de l'existence d'un problème parce que ne distinguant pas entre langue et graphie, n'est pas touchée, le monde des éducateurs, aussi bien ceux de l'enseignement du second degré que les instituteurs, s'est montré ces dernières années fort sensible aux critiques dont l'orthographe a été l'objet. Dans les contacts qui se multiplient et s'intensifient, à l'heure actuelle, entre linguistes professionnels et enseignants avides de “recyclage”, la question de l'orthographeest celle qui paraît susciter l'intérêt le plus vif. Sensibilisés par l'insuffisance flagrante des résultats obtenus par tous les efforts faits pour inculquer l'orthographe à leurs élèves, instituteurs et professeurs prennent conscience du fait que l'orthographe française est inadaptée aux conditions du monde d'aujourd'hui, à supposer que le système graphique du français, qui doit tant de ses traits à l'intervention de beaux-esprits, ait jamais, depuis quatre cents ans, été adapté aux besoins réels de la société française. Pour être sûr que l'ensemble de la population scolaire qui doit poursuivre des études au-delà des éléments ait acquis un maniement simplement satisfaisant de l'orthographe, il faudrait probablement que, pendant cinq ans, la moitié du temps disponible à, l'école soit consacré à, des exercices visant à, ce but.

The aim of this paper is to show how the investigation of a borderline and apparently minor area of phonetics may help to shed light on certain indistinct areas in phonological theory.