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Improved Techniques in Palatography and Kymography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

J. R. Firth  and
H. J. F. Adam
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Extract

Since the early ‘thirties we have found it necessary constantly and independently to review the sort of abstractions usually made in descriptive linguistics, and in making new ones to refer them to a schematic framework of levels, at each one of which some component of meaning could be handled by a system of constructs and stated.

Professor Panconcelli-Calzia seems only recently to have awakened to the idea that four-fifths of linguistics, including even experimental phonetics, is invention rather than discovery. The work of the English school of phonetics since the time of the Bells has been rich in invention, and earned the inadequate description of being “practical”. In the best sense of the word, descriptive linguistics must be practical, since its abstractions, fictions, inventions, call them what you will, are designed to handle instances of speech, spoken or written, and make statements of the meaning of what may be called typical speech events. All these fictions, whether made by machines or by direct verbal statement may perhaps be figuratively described as “asymptotic”.

If we are constantly mindful of the different levels of abstraction and the nature of the fictions set up, the inventions of kymography and palatography and the inventions of phonology or other branches of linguistics may be brought into relation and used to justify one another mutually.

The purpose of the present article is to give an illustration of the pressure of “invention” at the levels of phonology and even of general linguistic theory, which has led to ancillary “inventions” in the laboratory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , October 1950 , pp. 771 - 774
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1950

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References

page 771 note 1 See Firth, “Technique of Semantics,” Transactions of the Philological Society, 1935, and “Word Palatograms and Articulation ”, BSOAS., 1948.

page 771 note 2 “Das Als Ob in der Phonetik,” 250 pp., Stromverlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf, 1947.

page 771 note 3 See footnote on “Word Palatograms and Articulation” in Language, vol. 25, No. 1 (Fries and Pike, “Coexistent Phonemic Systems”):—

“Firth, J. R., in Word-palatograms and articulation, BSOAS xii, 857–864 (1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , makes a related but experimental abstraction of a phonetic characteristic from a word or syllable by noting the total effect of some one articulator throughout the whole unit; these effects are not Harris's simultaneous components, which affect contiguous sounds, but may be the result of non-contiguous segments.” It will be seen that the theoretical implications of the new approach are much wider than indicated in the above note.

The kymograms and palatograms illustrated were made in the laboratory in connection with research in Bhojpurī by Dr. B. X. Prasad of the University of Patna. See his thesis for the Ph.D., 1950, University of London Library.