scholarly journals Phonetic Reconstruction of Tautovocalic Diphthongs as a Problem of Linguistic Textology (In Nyegoshʼs Epic “Stephen the Little”)

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (22) ◽  
pp. 30-51
Author(s):  
Radmilo Marojevic ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Boundary

The author of this paper explains the interpretation of the diphthongs in the epic ”Stephen the Little” by Serbian poet Petar II Petrovich Njegos from the epoch of romanticism. They are: а) tautovocalic diphthongs in the same word, b) tautovocalic diphthongs at the word boundary and its enclitics, c) tautovocalic diphthongs at the word boundary and its proclitics, d) tautovocalic diphthongs at the boundary of two phonetic words, i.e. in sandhi. The analysis comprises the epic ”The Mountain Wreath” and the epic ”The Ray of the Microcosm”, and some of Njegos`s poems, аs well as examples from Serbian folk poems published in the first collection of folk poems ”Маlа prostonarodnya slavenо‑serbska pěsnarica” by Vuk Stefanovich Karadjich.

scholarly journals Italian preconsonantal s-voicing is not regressive voice assimilation

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bálint Huszthy
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Sibilant Fricatives ◽  
Synchronic Comparison

Abstract In the literature of laryngeal phonology Romance languages are considered voice languages, exhibiting a binary distinction between a voiced lenis and a voiceless fortis set of obstruents. Voice languages are characterised by regressive voice assimilation (RVA) due to the phonological activity of [voice]. Italian manifests a process similar to RVA, called preconsonantal s-voicing; that is, /s/ becomes voiced before voiced consonants. Since /sC/ is the only obstruent cluster in Italian phonotactics, Italian seems to fulfil the requirements for being a prototypical voice language. However, this paper argues that s-voicing is not an instance of RVA, at least from a synchronic phonological point of view. RVA and Italian preconsonantal s-voicing essentially differ at every level of a synchronic comparison: in the input, in the trigger, in the domain of application and in the frequency of the processes. In Italian only sibilant fricatives may undergo voicing before consonants; however, other obstruents (which mostly appear in loanwords) do not assimilate for [voice]. Italian preconsonantal s-voicing does not take place at the word boundary or at morpheme boundaries, and it seems to be optional is new loanwords; thus, it is not a postlexical process like RVA. The synchronic differences between the two phenomena are analysed in Classical Optimality Theory. The laryngeal system of Italian prefers faithfulness over markedness, which means that non-/sC/ obstruent clusters surface with underlying voice values; while the voicing of /s/ before voiced consonants is seen as phonetic and not phonological.

scholarly journals Teaching the pronunciation of sentence final and word boundary stops to French learners of English: distracted imitation versus audio-visual explanations

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maelle Amand ◽  
Zakaria Touhami
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Phase 1 ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Idiomatic Expressions ◽  
No Release ◽  
French And English

Studies on stop unrelease in second language acquisition have hitherto focused on the productions of Slavic learners of English (Šimačkova & Podlipsky, 2015) and experiments on Polish learners of English; the latter show the tendency to release stops on a more regular basis depending on the type of stop combinations (Rojczyk et al. 2013). In the present study, we aim to test the efficiency of audio-visual explanations as opposed to distracted imitation in pronunciation teaching amongst French learners of English. While unreleased stops are rather frequent in French and English - especially in plosives clusters (Byrd, 1993; Davidson, 2010), unreleased plosives in final positions are less common in French (Van Dommelen, 1983). During phase 1 of the experiment, three groups of 12 native French learners of English (level A1/A2, B1/B2 and C1/C2) were asked to read idiomatic expressions containing both homogeneous and heterogeneous sequences of voiceless stops straddled between words, namely, in sequences like “that cat” [dat˺ kat˺], and stops at the end of sentences like “I told him to speak” [tə spiːk˺]. In the second phase of the experiment, one half in each group was given a different task. The first group heard recorded versions of phase 1 sentences and before reading them out loud, counted up to five in their L1. Stimuli for imitation contained no release in the contexts under scrutiny. The other half had to watch a video explaining the phenomenon of unreleased stops with a production of phase-two expressions propped up by hand gestures. They were then asked to re-read the sentences given in phase 1. Based on these results the current study makes recommendations about what working environment should be prioritized in pronunciation teaching both in class and online (Kroger et al. 2010), and suggests ways to assess students and visually keep track of their progress.

scholarly journals Abstraction-based Efficiency in the Lexicon

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Past Experience ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
New Words ◽  
Prosodic Word ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
Spoken Words ◽  
Listening Experience ◽  
Candidate Set ◽  
Novel Words

AbstractListeners learn from their past experience of listening to spoken words, and use this learning to maximise the efficiency of future word recognition. This paper summarises evidence that the facilitatory effects of drawing on past experience are mediated by abstraction, enabling learning to be generalised across new words and new listening situations. Phoneme category retuning, which allows adaptation to speaker-specific articulatory characteristics, is generalised on the basis of relatively brief experience to words previously unheard from that speaker. Abstract knowledge of prosodic regularities is applied to recognition even of novel words for which these regularities were violated. Prosodic word-boundary regularities drive segmentation of speech into words independently of the membership of the lexical candidate set resulting from the segmentation operation. Each of these different cases illustrates how abstraction from past listening experience has contributed to the efficiency of lexical recognition.

scholarly journals Phonological Features of the Amharic Variety of South Wəllo

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Baye Yimam
Keyword(s):  
Word Boundary ◽  
Standard Variety ◽  
The South ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Linguistic Groups ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
Phonological Rules

This paper examines the phonological features that characterize the Amharic variety spoken in South Wəllo, an area which has been influenced by the diffusion of linguistic and cultural features arising from longstanding contact situations between Semitic and non-Semitic linguistic groups. Data from eight districts of the zone have shown that the South Wəllo variety has 26 consonant and seven vowel phonemes. The consonants are four fewer than that reported of the standard variety. The co-occurrence restrictions of the consonants and the syllable structures are the same as those of the standard variety. However, the phonological rules that operate at morpheme internal, morpheme and word boundary levels are different in the degree of complexity and directionality. These include inter-vocalic lenition of velar stops, word-final weakening of alveo-palatals, coalescence of lowering diphthongs, centering, lowering and fronting of vowels, metathesis of coronals and anteriors, and lexeme specific alternations of homorganic consonants. The description of the facts provides more substantive arguments in favor of the long-held claim that Wəllo constitutes a distinct dialect area.

Alternating-color words facilitate reading and eye movements among second-language learners of Chinese

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-699
Author(s):  
Wei Zhou ◽  
Wanwen Ye ◽  
Ming Yan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Fixation Duration ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Reading Speed ◽  
Word Segmentation ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Fixation Location ◽  
Reading Efficiency ◽  
Boundary Information

AbstractThe present study investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) in a Chinese sentence would facilitate the reading of second-language (L2) learners. Thirty-three Korean students were recruited in the eye-movement experiment. Relative to a baseline (i.e., mono-colors) condition, incorrect word segmentation produced closer fixation location toward the beginning of words, longer fixation duration, higher refixation rate, and slower reading speed. In contrast, word segmentation with alternating colors produced further fixation location toward the center of words, shorter fixation duration, lower refixation rate, and faster reading speed. These results indicate that L2 readers are capable of making use of word-boundary knowledge for saccade generation, which can result in a facilitation of reading efficiency.

scholarly journals Universal Word Segmentation: Implementation and Interpretation

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 421-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Shao ◽  
Christian Hardmeier ◽  
Joakim Nivre
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Word Segmentation ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Segmentation Accuracy ◽  
Small Set

Word segmentation is a low-level NLP task that is non-trivial for a considerable number of languages. In this paper, we present a sequence tagging framework and apply it to word segmentation for a wide range of languages with different writing systems and typological characteristics. Additionally, we investigate the correlations between various typological factors and word segmentation accuracy. The experimental results indicate that segmentation accuracy is positively related to word boundary markers and negatively to the number of unique non-segmental terms. Based on the analysis, we design a small set of language-specific settings and extensively evaluate the segmentation system on the Universal Dependencies datasets. Our model obtains state-of-the-art accuracies on all the UD languages. It performs substantially better on languages that are non-trivial to segment, such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew, when compared to previous work.

The syllable boundary in generative phonology

1979 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-131
Author(s):  
Marc Picard
Keyword(s):  
Word Boundary ◽  
Phonetic Information ◽  
Syllable Boundary ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Phonological Rule ◽  
Morpheme Boundary ◽  
Phonological Rules

In Natural Generative Phonology (NGP), the only phonological rules are those which describe alternations that take place in environments that can be specified in purely phonetic terms. As indicated by Hooper, these “‘phonetic terms’ refer to phonological features (that have intrinsic phonetic content) and phonological boundaries (that have a necessary and consistent phonetic manifestation)” (1976:14). Any rule which changes phonological features in an environment described in morphosyntactic or lexical terms is not phonological but morphophonemic. Since by definition a phonological rule cannot contain non-phonetic information, this entails, among other things, the exclusion of any boundary that is not determined by phonetic means. In other words, the syllable ($) and the pause (| |) are the only boundaries which can appear in a phonological rule in NGP. The word boundary (# and ##) and the morpheme boundary (+), which are determined by syntactic and semantic means, can only appear in a morphophonemic rule.

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