論《龍龕手鑑》正俗體字聲符替換與唐五代西北方音

<p>遼僧行均所著《龍龕手鑑》，成書於宋太宗至道三年（997），乃專為佛教徒通解文字研讀佛典所編纂的一部字書。當中引用他書的情況相當複雜，除了佛經音義書，還有不少前代字書、韻書，因此不管是在音韻性質或者語料時代的判別上，皆不宜做太單純的思考。本文在孔仲溫、儲泰松等學者的啟發下，一方面考察當中眾多參用資料的成書年代，以確定其語料的時代性，繼而觀察筆者從中整理所得的四百多筆正俗體字聲符替換字組，並分析存在其間的音韻現象。發現當中某些音韻表現與唐五代西北方音的音韻特徵具有一致性，與過去學者們運用反切系聯法，以系聯當中複雜音切所得結果有所不同。在跳脫《切韻》或是通語雅音的音系框架之外，得以看見《龍龕手鑑》不同面向的音韻內涵。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>Longkan Shoujian, a dictionary completed by a Liao dynasty monk named Xingjun in 997, is used to aid Buddhists in the study of Buddhist text and scriptures. Because Longkan Shoujian cites from numerous sources including yinyishu (dictionaries of pronunciations and meanings), dictionaries published in previous dynasties, and rhyme dictionaries, one must investigate thoroughly when attempting to decipher the phonological characteristics of Longkan Shoujian and the dynasties in which its corpuses were written. Inspired by scholars such as Chung-wen Kung and Tai-song Chu, this study examined the years in which many of the cited materials were completed to verify the dynasties in which the corpuses of Longkan Shoujian were written. Subsequently, this study explored the phonetic component substitution groups for the 400+ canonical and noncanonical Chinese characters that it had organized and summarized; and analyzed the phonological phenomena within. The study results showed that some of the phonological characteristics were similar to those of Northwestern China in the Five Dynasties period, challenging the results obtained by previous scholars using the fanqie association method (which involves separating a character&rsquo;s pronunciation into two other characters). By not accepting information preached in Qieyun and the phonological system of common languages in China as the gospel truth, this study discovered the different phonological characteristics observed in Longkan Shoujian.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

A. Blok in the Poetic World of V. Shalamov

Shalamov repeatedly noted the significant role of A. Blok in the formation of his own poetic system. The work of the outstanding artist of the Silver Age is discussed in Shalamov’s essays (in more than twenty works), as well as in “Kolyma Tales” and unpublished notes about Blok (The Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts). Shalamov emphasizes that Blok is a great poet, at the same time very little studied. It is precisely taken poetic lines of Blok that serve as the epigraph for “Kolyma notebooks”. The article analyzes parallels in the worldview of the two poets (a feeling of the closest relationship of personal fate with the turning points in Russian history); in the imagery (in particular, various levels of interpretation of the snowstorm motif, which has special significance in the work of both poets, are discussed in detail. Shalamov’s succession in relation to Blok in comprehension of this image is shown, as well as cardinal differences in its explication in the lyrics of the two poets). The unanimity in understanding the challenges of art is analyzed (Blok’s idea of combining “beauty and benefit” in artistic work is close to Shalamov’s thinking); in verse technique (special significance of phonetic component). Not only published texts are involved in the study, but also materials stored in Shalamov’s archive at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Use of partial information to learn to read Chinese characters in non-native Chinese learners

The ability to decode new words of varying degrees of orthographic-phonological mapping is an important word recognition skill across languages. Chinese characters represent three types of phonetic regularity: regular, semi-regular, and irregular depending on the degree of reliability of the pronunciation information provided by the phonetic component. This study investigated whether adult non-native Chinese learners can use partial phonological information encoded in semi-regular characters to learn the pronunciations of new characters. A total of 55 college students, enrolled in an intensive Chinese program with varying proficiency levels, were taught the pronunciations of 18 novel compound characters of three phonetic regularity types over three trials. Non-native Chinese learners of advanced and intermediate levels learned the pronunciations of regular characters (initial-same and final-same), which contain full information about pronunciation, and semi-regular characters (initial-different, final-same), which contain partial information about pronunciation, significantly better than irregular characters (initial-different and final-different), which contain misleading pronunciation information. The performance difference between semi-regular and irregular characters decreased over trials. Novice students demonstrated limited ability in using partial information to learn to pronounce characters compared to intermediate and advanced students. These results provide implications for effective character instruction for adult learners of Chinese with varying Chinese proficiency levels.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF SYNESTHESIA AND FEATURES OF SYNESTHETIC PERCEPTION OF DEAF PEOPLE

The article is devoted to synesthesia, its study from the point of view of psychology and neuropsychology, features of synesthetic perception and importance of synesthesia for deaf people. The author refers to the works of modern researchers of synesthesia in the field of psychology and neuropsychology and examines various types of synesthetic reactions and associations. Synesthesia researchers study this phenomenon comprehensively, in the sensoryperceptual- cognitive continuum. Synesthetic stimuli and reactions are related to perception and can be considered in terms of its emotional component. It is emphasized that synesthesia affects the individual’s memory, in particular, A. R. Luria, who investigated the phenomenon of synesthesia, believes that synesthetic sensations contribute to better memorization of information, especially perceived from hearing. A. R. Luria notes that at hearing perception of a word, its phonetic component remains on the last place, and the dominant meaning is semantic. In synesthesia, a brighter visual and auditory image is attached to the perception of meaning. When memorizing, the visual component of the image remains the leading one. For deaf people, the meaning itself, perceived with the help of sign language, is already assigned to the visual component. But this is not always a visual image. The author refers to the testimonies of deaf people, who describe their synesthetic experience, showing that the absence of hearing is not an obstacle to the perception of sound, which can be felt by other senses, touch and vision.

Accent evaluation from extemporaneous child speech

A key issue in judging foreign accent is to isolate the phonetic component from potentially confounding higher-level factors such as grammatical or prosodic errors which arise when using natural sentence-length speech material. The current study evaluated accent and intelligibility ratings of children’s speech for isolated words spliced out of extemporaneous material elicited via a picture description task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that word scores and accent ratings provided by native judges pattern as in earlier studies, validating the use of word-based material derived from natural speech. In a second experiment, listeners rated the degree of foreign accent and comprehensibility for unrelated sequences of 1 to 8 words from the same talker. Degree of foreign accent was judged to increase with sequence length, asymptoting by 2 word sequences, although listeners did not rate the sequence based on the most-accented word it contains. Comprehensibility was judged to be lower as sequence length increased, asymptoting at 4 words. These findings suggest that short sequences of randomly-permuted words extracted from extemporaneous speech can be used for robust accent and comprehensibility judgements whose focus is on the phonetic basis for deviations from the native norm.

Sibilant Voicing in Ecuadorian Spanish

Highland Ecuadorian Spanish has a unique process of /s/ voicing that differs from other dialects of Spanish in that word-final /s/ is realized as [z] intervocalically (Lipski 1989, 1994, Robinson 1979). Ecuadorian /s/ voicing is problematic for serial models of phonology as well as for some output-to-output analyses within Optimality Theory. It is argued that the data can be accounted for by an optimalitytheoretic analysis that incorporates phonetic underspecification as a strategy to satisfy coda-licensing restrictions. Sibilants without a voicing target remain unspecified until the phonetic component, where they adopt the laryngeal configuration of neighboring sounds and can thus be expected to exhibit gradient and variable voicing. Contrary to existing non-derivational proposals (Bradley 2007, Colina 2006), it is shown that it is not necessary to resort to two levels of representation (lexical and postlexical) to explain the behavior of Ecuadorian Spanish. The analysis proposed also accounts for cross-dialectal variation affecting word-final prevocalic /s/.