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.

This paper investigates the relevance of three prosodic parameters (alignment, duration and scaling) in the conveyance of contrastive focus in Catalan, Italian and Spanish. In particular, we seek to determine how the Effort Code is instantiated in the expression of contrastive focus in both production and perception. According to the Effort Code, putting more effort into speech production will lead to greater articulatory precision (de Jong 1995, Gussenhoven 2004) and this is related to the expression of focus in the sense that wider pitch excursions will be used to signal meanings that are relevant from an informational point of view. A dual production and perception experiment based on an identification task was conducted. Results for the production part show that contrastive focus accents have earlier peaks for all three languages but f0 peaks are systematically lower only in Italian. Syllables bearing the contrastive focus accents are also longer in the three languages. Regarding the results for the perception part, converging evidence is found not only for an active perceptual use of the three prosodic parameters present in production but also for language-specific preferences for particular prosodic parameters.

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.

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.

This paper presents impressionistic, electroglottographic and acoustic data exploring the distribution of glottalic and pulmonic airstream in word-final Scottish English obstruents. We explore the relationship between these airstream mechanisms and aspirated or glottalised phonatory settings of individual speakers near this obstruent locus. We address the hypothesis that the tendency for pre-stop glottalisation found in some British English varieties can explain the occurrence of glottalically-released stops. This hypothesis suggests that ejectives would appear as an occasional artefact of mistimed glottalisation. We also investigate whether a glottalic airstream acts as a potential contrast enhancement mechanism, through association with /−voice/ as opposed to /+voice/ stops. We show that glottalisation and aspiration can readily co-occur in the same speaker, and that local phonatory setting (with glottalised or aspirated articulation) can be consistently used as a secondary correlate of obstruent /−voice/, in the context of stops and fricatives respectively. The results show that although glottalisation as a secondary correlate of /−voice/ stops often co-occurs with an ejective release, they are not necessarily bound together. These results argue against a simple epiphenomenal explanation for the appearance of ejective stops in English, while also showing that they are not (yet) a systematic phonological enhancement in this variety.

There is no standard phonetically balanced short passage for Portuguese research and clinical practice. This paper presents results of a novel analysis of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) passage that aims to determine if it is phonetically balanced for European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on new transcriptions resulting from algorithms developed for grapheme–phone transcription in these two varieties of Portuguese. These algorithms (based on standard EP and São Paulo BP varieties) are the same as those used to collect the frequency data, which is central to determining if a text is phonetically balanced. Results showed that neither transcription violates phonotactic rules, i.e. permissible combinations of speech sounds. The NWS is not phonetically balanced for BP if the phonemes are considered individually but is evenly distributed in terms of manner of articulation. The EP version of the NWS passage is a phonetically balanced text for EP.

Previous research has indicated that the H (high) of a nuclear accent may be realized as a flat stretch of contour rather than as a single turning point. Both the duration of this plateau and its alignment within the accented syllable are affected by the segmental and prosodic structure of the utterance. The present work investigates whether a non-structural variable, namely pitch span, also affects the realization of the plateau. Speakers replicated all-sonorant utterances in different pitch spans. Results show that both the duration and alignment of the plateau vary with pitch span but in ways different from the way they vary with prosodic structure. Importantly, results also indicate that, when using a proportional measure of alignment, the end of the plateau is anchored within the syllable for each speaker and may be a marker of linguistic structure.

Linguopalatal and sagittal vocal tract configuration data from a large number of languages reveal that the so-called palatal consonants (i.e. [ç ʎ c ɲ j]), as well as the vowel [i], are often realized simultaneously at the alveolar and palatal zones. Moreover, while some of these sound categories may also exhibit a palatal constriction ([ç c ɲ j i]), others are exclusively alveolar or alveolopalatal in line with the manner of articulation characteristics involved ([ʎ], also [ɕ] and [tʃ]). Consonants may favor one or more places of articulation and differ in fronting degree depending on the language taken into consideration; moreover, there appears to be a symmetry requirement by which consonants differing in manner, such as [c] and [ɲ], may agree in place. The data reported in this paper argue in favor of a revision of the articulatory classification of palatal consonants by the International Phonetic Alphabet involving their subdivision into two classes, an alveolopalatal and a palatal one.

There are many unsolved problems concerning the linguistic interpretation of intonation curves obtained instrumentally. Among the major ones are (1) How accurate must the instrumental data be to make sure that no linguistically relevant information is missed? (2) Which of the details of the intonation curve are linguistically relevant? (3) How should the graph be scaled? (4) How should the curves be normalized so as to neutralize individual (speaker-dependent) differences?

Theoretical and descriptive work on Spanish phonetics and phonology has been largely based on Peninsular varieties. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory characteristics of coronal consonant contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish. Simultaneous EPG and acoustic data were collected from five speakers from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and three speakers from Havana (Cuba) reading sentences with various syllable-initial coronal consonants corresponding to the orthographic 〈t, ch, n, ñ, s, z, ll, y, l, r〉. As a control, the same data were collected from a single speaker of Peninsular Spanish from Madrid. As expected, the main distinction in both varieties was made between anterior and posterior coronal consonants ((denti-)alveolars vs. (alveolo-)palatals) and reflected the historical merger of the sounds represented by 〈s–z〉 and 〈ll–y〉. At the same time, the results revealed some consistent differences between the two varieties in the location of the constriction and the amount of linguopalatal contact for most coronal consonants. First, the coronal consonants produced by the Argentine speakers were overall considerably more fronted and more constricted than the corresponding consonants produced by the Cuban speakers. Second, 〈ll, y〉 were produced as a fronted alveolo-palatal fricative by the Argentine speakers, and as an approximant by the Cuban speakers. Inter-speaker variation was observed within the varieties in the articulation of some consonants, namely in the Argentine alveolo-palatal fricative and nasal (〈ll, y〉 and 〈ñ〉), and the Cuban alveolo-palatal affricate 〈ch〉.

Hakka Chinese is also known in China as Kejia dialect. The present study is based on phonetic data collected from native speakers of Hakka Chinese, male and female, aged between 18 and 22, during our field trips to Hakka-speaking Meixian County in the northeastern part of Guangdong Province in southeastern China in 2007. The speakers have lived all their life in Meijiang District of the county, speaking Meijiang variety which is considered representative of Meixian Hakka. The style of speech illustrated here is that typical of the educated younger generation and the recording is that of a 22-year-old male college student.

The Slavic affricate represented by /č/ is tacitly or explicitly assumed to be // for all Slavic languages. In this paper we revise the affricate inventories of Polish and Czech, showing that the symbol /č/ stands for two different sounds: the palatoalveolar // in Czech and the retroflex // in Polish. This conclusion is supported by acoustic results for Polish and Czech data. The fact that COG (centre of gravity) values of frication are not significantly different for Polish and Czech /č/ appears a bit surprising especially in light of the fact that COG is generally seen as a parameter contributing to the distinction of fricatives (including sibilants, see e.g. Gordon, Barthmaier & Sands 2002). Our results show that other parameters such as duration of the frication phase, F1 and F2 of the following vowel as well as spectral slopes are more reliable cues for distinguishing the small differences between affricates examined here.

Maastricht (Mosae Trajectum in Roman times) is the capital of the Dutch province of Limburg and one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands. Situated in the extreme south, close to the Belgian border, the city is fairly small, with a population of just over 120,000. Maastricht enjoys a world-wide reputation as the place where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. The dialect of Maastricht belongs to the south-eastern dialect group (Weijnen 1966: §§ 166, 173), which shares a number of properties with dialects in Belgium and Germany. A more recent classification (Belemans, Kruijsen & van Keymeulen 1998) assigns the dialect to Central Limburgian, which comprises seven subgroups in the Netherlands and Belgium, more particularly to Trichterlands. Two earlier descriptions are Houben (1905), which is historically oriented, and van Buuren (1991).

Prenasalized stops, that is, homorganic nasal+stop elements that behave as single phonological segments, raise a number of interesting questions concerning the relationship between phonological units and timing in speech. Do complex phonetic elements of this kind occupy the same duration as simpler elements, such as plain stops or nasals? Do prenasalized stops have the same timing pattern as a phonological sequence of nasal plus stop? How do prenasalized stops act with respect to rules which adjust the duration of neighboring segments? For example, would a vowel before a prenasalized stop be shortened by the widespread rule which shortens a vowel in a closed syllable (Maddieson 1985)? It has been argued that the status of prenasalized stops as single segments is directly related to their duration. They have been defined as nasal+stop sequences with the duration typical of other single segments (Herbert 1986). He, and Sagey (1986), in her dissertation on complex segments, both indicate that they would expect phonological consonant sequences to have longer durations than single segments regardless of whether the single segments are phonetically simple or complex. On the other hand, Ladefoged and Maddieson (1986) suggest that there is no demonstrated phonetic difference in timing between nasal+stop sequences and prenasalized stops. Purported language-internal contrasts between these elements actually involve a difference between geminate and single nasals before stops (as in Sinhalese), or between syllabic and non-syllabic nasals before stops. They suggest that deciding if a nasal+stop element is a prenasalized stop is not a phonetic issue but one which concerns solely the phonology of the language in question.

One of the unresolved issues in the field of intonational phonology is whether pitch accent range differences are used by languages to express discrete linguistic distinctions. In Catalan, as in some other Romance languages, a rising-falling nuclear pitch contour – i.e. a rising pitch accent associated with the utterance-final stressed syllable followed by a Low boundary tone – can be used to convey three different pragmatic meanings depending on its pitch range properties: information focus statements (IFSs), corrective focus statements (CFSs), and counter-expectational questions (CEQs). In order to investigate how these pragmatic meanings are distributed across the pitch range continuum and whether Catalan listeners use these tonal scaling distinctions to identify such meanings, we performed an identification task and a congruity test. The results show that CEQs differ from both IFSs and CFSs in a discrete way, yet the perceived difference between IFSs and CFSs cannot be exclusively explained by scaling differences. These findings provide further evidence that pitch range differences can be used to make intonational distinctions in some languages, and strengthen the argument that pitch range features need to be represented descriptively at the phonological level.

This paper presents electropalatography (EPG) data from two female speakers of Central Arrernte, a language with six places of articulation, including four coronal contrasts. Both speakers were recorded reading the same list of words using two different types of artificial palate: the standard Reading palate, and the new Articulate palate. Data are presented from seventeen lingual consonants of this language. It is suggested that since the Articulate palate provides more coverage of the velar and dental regions, it may be able to better capture the crucial laminal and apical distinctions that exist in Australian languages such as Central Arrernte. However, caution is advised in interpreting the results from the two different types of artificial palate, since for many consonants, palatograms as well as values for standard analysis measures differ greatly between the two palate types.

While the history of interest in voice quality dates back at least as far as Henry Sweet (e.g. 1890), there was for many years little agreement on how to classify voice quality or how to transcribe it as part of a phonetic transcription. Indeed, there is not even agreement on precisely what the term covers in that it is often restricted to aspects of voice quality derived from vocal fold activity, rather than the fuller meaning which encompasses features derived from supralaryngeal settings of the articulators. Authors such as Nolan (1983) have used the phrase long-term quality as an alternative; however, in this article we will retain the traditional term but with a wide application to account for voice quality derived from airflow features, vocal fold activity, and supralaryngeal activity.

A poll of BrE pronunciation preferences was carried out in late 1998, based on a self-selected sample of nearly 2000 ‘speech-conscious’ respondents, who answered a hundred questions about words of uncertain or controversial pronunciation. The findings allow us to answer questions about lexical incidence and sound changes in progress. (This is a revised and considerably extended version of the report published as Wells 1999.)