The use of High Rising Terminal intonation contours (HRTs) in statements is a particularly salient and often stigmatized feature of a number of varieties of English. In recent years a number of linguists have investigated the feature from pragmatic (ching 1982, Meyerhoff 1991) and sociolinguistic (Guy, Horvath, Vonwiller, Diasley and Rogers 1986, Allen 1990, Britain 1992) perspectives and its use has also stimulated long running debates in the press (New York Times, Fall 1991; Sydney Morning Herald, June 1992) about its origins, functions and appropriateness. In this paper, we combine a brief discussion of its use and dunction with a F0-plot analysis of a number of HRT contours from recordings made in Wellington, New Zealand in 1989.

The study is concerned with the relative synchronic stability of three contrastive sibilant fricatives /s ʂ ɕ/ in Polish. Tongue movement data were collected from nine first-language Polish speakers producing symmetrical real and non-word CVCV sequences in three vowel contexts. A Gaussian model was used to classify the sibilants from spectral information in the noise and from formant frequencies at vowel onset. The physiological analysis showed an almost complete separation between /s ʂ ɕ/ on tongue-tip parameters. The acoustic analysis showed that the greater energy at higher frequencies distinguished /s/ in the fricative noise from the other two sibilant categories. The most salient information at vowel onset was for /ɕ/, which also had a strong palatalizing effect on the following vowel. Whereas either the noise or vowel onset was largely sufficient for the identification of /s ɕ/ respectively, both sets of cues were necessary to separate /ʂ/ from /s ɕ/. The greater synchronic instability of /ʂ/ may derive from its high articulatory complexity coupled with its comparatively low acoustic salience. The data also suggest that the relatively late stage of /ʂ/ acquisition by children may come about because of the weak acoustic information in the vowel for its distinction from /s/.

Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (henceforth ABN) is a term used generally in the Netherlands by linguists and laymen alike to refer to the country's prestige dialect; a literal translation would be ‘General Refined Dutch’. Though ABN is a dialect rather than an accent (Wells, 1970:231), its status is comparable to that of the RP accent of English since it is essentially a social variety only loosely associated with a particular geographical area. ABN speakers are to be found in greatest numbers throughout the Western provinces (i.e. Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Utrecht) and particularly in the annular Randstad conurbation linking the towns of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht; but ABN is to be heard from the upper socio-economic classes all over the Netherlands, and is also looked to as a standard in the Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium.

The relative prominence of syllables is essential to the segmentation of speech and therefore a crucial component of language comprehension, acquisition and learning. Incorrect placement and marking of prominence in English by non-native speakers can lead to problems in comprehensibility. Because the English and French phonological systems are so different, especially in the domain of stress, this can cause serious difficulties for many French speakers learning English. Indeed, some authors have posited the existence of ‘stress deafness’ in certain individuals. I suggest that French and English native speakers listen differently for stress, attributing different importance to the acoustic cues of F0, duration, amplitude and formant structure. This study focuses on the relative importance of these four cues with both English and French stimuli for English and French native speakers, and the results support the hypothesis.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new version of the Spoken English Corpus which will be of interest to phoneticians and other speech scientists. The Spoken English Corpus is a well-known collection of spoken-language texts that was collected and transcribed in the 1980's in a joint project involving IBM UK and the University of Lancaster (Alderson and Knowles forthcoming, Knowles and Taylor 1988). One valuable aspect of it is that the recorded material on which it was based is fairly freely available and the recording quality is generally good. At the time when the recordings were made, the idea of storing all the recorded material in digital form suitable for computer processing was of limited practicality. Although storage on digital tape was certainly feasible, this did not provide rapid computer access. The arrival of optical disk technology, with the possibility of storing very large amounts of digital data on a compact disk at relatively low cost, has brought about a revolution in ideas on database construction and use. It seemed to us that the recordings of the Spoken English Corpus (hereafter SEC) should now be converted into a form which would enable the user to gain access to the acoustic signal without the laborious business of winding through large amounts of tape. Once this was done, we should be able not only to listen to the recordings in a very convenient way, but also to carry out many automatic analyses of the material by computer.

Auditory and acoustic data were produced from recordings of a Glaswegian English speaker in conversational and reading modes. Clearly different intonational systems were used in the two modes. The reading style used an intonation similar to that used in standard British intonation (the intonation of ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RPI)). The conversational style was an example of the type of intonation used in a number of cities in the north of the UK (Urban North British Intonation (UNBI)), characterised by a default intonation involving rising or rising-slumping nuclear pitch patterns. This speaker illustrates a clear-cut case of intonational diglossia with a falling default tune in the one mode and a rising(-falling) default tune in the other.

Nepali, a language of the Indo-Aryan family, is the official language of Nepal. According to the 2001 population census of Nepal, more than 11 million Nepalese (48.61% of the total population) claim this language as their mother tongue. It is also spoken in other countries of South Asia, such as India and Bhutan, as well as by members of the Nepalese Diaspora around the world. The population census of India of 1991 reported that more than two million Indians use Nepali as their mother tongue. Within Nepal, Nepali shows some dialectal variation mainly linked to geographical and socio-cultural factors. Nevertheless, the dialect called the ‘eastern’ dialect spoken by a majority of Nepali speakers shows rather little variation (Bandhu et al. 1971).

Nuuchahnulth (PHONETICS), often referred to in the literature as Nootka, is a Wakashan language spoken by people living on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Each of thirteen Nuuchahnulth bands represents a different dialect group. Nitinaht (Diitiidath) is usually included in the Nuuchahnulth group, but it is divergent enough to be considered a separate language. The data in this illustration represent the Ahousaht (PHONETICS) dialect.

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family and is closely related to Finnish. It has about one million native speakers in Estonia and about 150,000 elsewhere in the world. In phonetics, Estonian is probably best known for its three degrees of contrastive quantity: short (Q1), long (Q2) and overlong (Q3).

For some speakers of English, realization of the fricative in the consonant cluster /stɹ/may be undergoing a sound change in progress. Previous reports suggest that /s/ is being realized as the postalveolar fricative [ʃ], with the approximant /ɹ/ as a possible trigger. Research in sociolinguistics also indicates that there may be various intermediate stages of the change, falling somewhere between a typical /ʃ/ and /s/. However, information about the precise phonetic characteristics of these novel variants is still sparse, and existing sociolinguistic studies have not compared speakers’ realization of /stɹ/ to their typical /s/ and /ʃ/ productions. This paper uses the acoustic measurement of spectral peak to compare ten English speakers’ productions of the onsets /ʃ/, /ʃɹ/, /stɹ/, and /s/. The findings suggest that the majority of tokens produced by these speakers fall within their normal range for /ʃ/, with only limited evidence of intermediate forms. It is proposed that spectral peak measurement seems to be a stable method for use in future research categorizing variants of /stɹ/. However, this should include comparison to subjects’ normal /ʃ/ productions.

The unstressed high vowels /i/ and /u/ are subject to extreme shortening, devoicing, or elision in certain environments in standard modern Greek. This process goes on below the consciousness of most native speakers in their own speech; however, they will recognize it in speakers of northern Greek dialects where unstressed /i/ and /u/ are frequently elided (see Newton, 1972; Papadopoulos, 1926). In the phonology of the language, vowel reduction and elision are treated as a collection of optional ‘fast speech’ rules (e.g. Theophanopoulou-Kontou, 1973). In this study, they are considered as related stages in the same phonetic process, which will be described from both an auditory and acoustic point of view. An analysis of read texts and spontaneous speech samples by a number of educated speakers from Athens and Thessalonika shows that vowel reduction is not purely optional, but depends on a number of factors, the most important of which are phonetic environment and position relative to the stressed syllable. Some hypotheses concerning the phonetic motivation for this kind of vowel reduction will then be discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine voice onset time as a phonetic correlate of voicing distinction in standard Persian. Issues pertinent to VOT are also addressed: namely, the effect of place of articulation, vowel context and sex of speakers. The VOTs were measured from recordings of five male and five female speakers reading 65 words that contained a full set of Persian oral stops in word initial and intervocalic positions. This acoustic experiment indicated that VOT distinguishes voiced from voiceless stops. The results also revealed that Persian uses mainly {voiceless unaspirated} and {voiceless aspirated} categories for [±voice] distinction in initial position and {voiced} and {voiceless aspirated} categories in intervocalic position. Vowel context also affected VOT values but the only significant difference was due to high vowels, which caused the preceding voiceless stop to have a longer VOT. Examining sex differences in the VOT values indicated that for voiced items females produced longer VOTs than males. However, voiceless items displayed no significant sex differences for VOT values. Fundamental frequency (F0) of the onset of the following vowel was also examined as another cue to voice distinction. Although the F0 values of voiceless tokens were higher than those of the voiced ones in each voiced–voiceless category, the results suggest that F0 is not a major cue distinguishing the two stop categories.

Temporal lengthening of gestures and segments located in a boundary-adjacent syllable has been found in both pre- and postboundary contexts. However, the temporal extent or scope of this lengthening, particularly in the articulatory domain, is not well described. We address the question of scope of prosodic lengthening by considering specifically whether prominence interacts with boundary-related articulatory lengthening in such a way that prominent elements not immediately at a phrase edge are lengthened relative to the same prominent elements phrase-medially (i.e. at a considerable distance from a boundary). Articulatory kinematic data were collected for three subjects to analyze consonant constrictions of prominent syllables located (1) either immediately before or after a boundary and (2) two and three syllables away from that boundary. The results indicate that, as expected, gestures undergo prosodic lengthening when immediately local to the phase boundary. However, some subjects did display prosodic lengthening at a small remove from the boundary for a prominent syllable. This effect was strongest in the postboundary condition. These results suggest that a consideration of prominence may be relevant in understanding the temporal patterning of boundary-related articulatory lengthening.

This paper presents the results of an electropalatographic investigation into non-durational properties of Italian consonant gemination. The evidence suggests a more palatalised tongue configuration during the production of geminate coronal sonorants and stops than in their non-geminate counterparts. Evidence is also found of differences in the active articulator, with a laminal articulation more characteristic of geminates, and an apical articulation of non-geminates. It is proposed that Italian gemination be thought of more broadly as fortition, and the implications of this are discussed.

In his R-tickle, William Barry (Barry 1997: 35) invites others who may have pondered along similar lines ‘to offer additional complementary or alternative views’. In somewhat belatedly accepting his invitation, I would like to make some remarks on trills, on ‘molar r’, and on rhotacism, followed by some thoughts on the question of the historical primacy of trill, at least within Indo-European.

Dinka is a Western Nilotic language within the Nilo-Saharan family. There are over two million speakers (Gordon 2005). The Dinkas live along the banks of the White Nile and its tributaries in Southern Sudan. There are also communities elsewhere within Sudan, in particular in the capital Khartoum, and abroad. Cows play a key role in the Dinka economy, and also in the sociocultural system. Four major dialect areas are commonly distinguished: Padang, Rek, Agar, and Bor. The variety of Dinka represented here – Luanyjang or, as in Roettger & Roettger (1989), Luac – is part of the Rek dialect group. The term Luanyjang ‘Luac Dinka’ refers in the first place to a section within the Dinka ethnic group, and by extension also to their variety of the Dinka language. The main Luanyjang town is Wuncuei, located about 170 kilometers east of the city of Wau. Luanyjang has around 15000 speakers according to Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), although the current number is likely to be much higher.

This paper describes the consonant inventory of the endangered southern African language Nǀuu. Our novel approach to segment classification accounts for all 73 Nǀuu consonants with just four phonetic dimensions (place, manner, phonation, airstream) and does away with the phonetically empty category click accompaniment. We provide ultrasound data showing that the posterior constrictions in clicks are not produced at the ‘velar’ place of articulation, and that posterior place differs with anterior place. We therefore argue for a terminological shift from velaric to lingual airstream mechanism. Our data also show that the posterior place of articulation is the same in Nǀuu's five lingual ([⊙ ǀ ǃ ǁ ǂ]) and linguo-pulmonic ([]) stops. We argue that the difference between these segment classes is best captured in terms of airstream, not place. Plain clicks use only the lingual airstream, while linguo-pulmonic segments are airstream contours, in which the transition to the pulmonic airstream occurs within the segment rather than at its boundary. Our evidence suggests that the contrast between ‘velar’ and ‘uvular’ clicks proposed for the related language ǃXóõ is likely also one of airstream and that a contrast solely in terms of posterior place would be articulatorily impossible.

This paper is concerned with a phenomenon that has in previous descriptions been labelled ‘glottal reinforcement’, ‘pre-glottalization’ or ‘glottalization’ (for discussion of ‘glottal replacement’ and the distinction between ‘full’ and ‘pre-’ glottalization see below, 10.1). The essential characteristic of this glottalization is that the oral closure for /p/, /t/ or /k/ is preceded by a glottal closure, but there is much variation from one accent to another in terms both of the distribution of the glottal closure and of its articulatory characteristics (especially the duration of the closure). Of the literature on the subject, a speculative article by Christophersen (1952) followed by a reply from O'Connor (1952), a study by Andrésen eventually published as a book (1968) and a study by Higginbottom (1964) are the best known. I shall use the term ‘glottalization’ in this paper: being a more general label it does not commit one to the possibly misleading implications of the other names.

In this paper it will be claimed that English is currently undergoing a vowel shift similar in effect to the fifteenth century Great Vowel Shift. A comment to this effect is made by Hawkins (1973), but the idea is not developed there. Evidence will be taken from twentieth-century descriptions of English, and from descriptions of varieties of English.