0. Introduction Human language only uses a subset of sounds that are physiologically possible. Within this subset there is a core of widely recurring sounds. The structure and frequency of these speech sounds is extensively described in UPSID – the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (Maddieson 1984), a landmark publication in comparative phonology and point of departure for PRUPSID , ...

With reference to Irvine and Gal's (2000) model of how language ideologies are constructed, this study examines the linguistic basis for the iconization of Southern American English vowels. The specific focus is on the spectral and temporal properties of the low front vowel /ae/ (TRAP). The paper proposes a unified analysis of this vowel’s seemingly inconsistent behavior as part of the Southern...

This paper presents the first results on the Mo Piu tonal system. This language is undocumented, unwritten and moreover in great danger. As the tasks of labeling phonetics and tones is hard to carry out when references on the language are lacking, this paper aims at presenting our method to try to build reliable data in order to understand the tonal system, and the main findings concerning the ...

Languages where phonation type and tone are contrastive make use of extremely fine and controlled actions of laryngeal structures; hence, there is little opportunity to variation in either phonation or pitch. Nonetheless, many American Indian languages have contrastive nonmodal phonation, which, moreover, is subject to a great deal of variation. There are a few studies addressing the phonetics ...

This paper deals with the integration of technical progress in the last decade into phonetics teaching at the undergraduate and the graduate levels, drawing on personal experience. Phonetics has profited most from such progress. Some points that I feel are most important are reviewed: the systematic use of PowerPoint and video projection during the class, with conduction of on-line experiments;...

The lingual frenum is a mucosal fold that connects the bottom of the body of the tongue to the floor of the mouth and to the mandibular bone. Ankyloglossia results when the frenum is thick and very tight and/or its place of insertion limits the mobility of the tongue. If the anomaly is relatively severe and generates mechanical limitations and functional challenges, surgical reduction of the fr...

This paper reviews some of the basic premises of Quantal-Enhancement Theory as developed by K.N. Stevens and his colleagues. Quantal theory seeks to explain why some articulatory and acoustic dimensions are favored over others in distinctive feature contrasts across languages. In this paper, after a review of basic concepts, a protocol for quantal feature definitions is proposed and problems in...

This paper explores the usage of antepenultimate and penultimate stress in 1st person plural past tense verb forms in Polish. Although Polish generally has penultimate stress, prescriptive grammars treat these verb forms as an exception, assigning antepenultimate stress. It has been argued elsewhere that penultimate stress is possible in these forms, although in colloquial speech. Data from 40 ...