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The aim of this chapter is to provide the state-of-the-art of the research on the development of suprasegmental phonology in bilingual children from infancy through childhood. First, we discuss word-level prosodic phenomena, with a special focus on the bilingual acquisition of word stress and syllable structure, which has been a lively area of research. We also present recent data on the acquisition of tone, which remains a less investigated topic. Second, we consider the acquisition of phrase-level prosody, namely, rhythm and intonation. For each domain of prosodic development, we briefly review monolingual patterns and discuss how learning two (or more) phonological systems can affect developmental trajectories, showing that there can be different cross-linguistic interactions such as transfer, delay, acceleration, or fusion. We also consider potential influencing factors that can trigger different tracks in the development of prosody, for example age of onset, amount of exposure, language dominance, and simultaneous or sequential language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research.
This chapter reviews the last twenty-five years of L2 prosody research in three sections, word stress, sentence intonation, and rhythm, and presents findings in relation to two underlying themes, form-meaning mapping and additive versus subtractive bilingual contexts. Concerning L2 stress, pioneering research framed perception difficulties either as an L1-to-L2 cue-transfer problem or as a processing deficit linked to learners’ inability to represent contrastive stress in their lexicons. Recent research established the extent and limits of those initial frames. L2 sentence intonation has multiple factors modeling its variation. One of them, social meaning, and in particular accommodation literature revealed the effect of affective factors which in multilingual communities became stronger than that of linguistic and social factors. As regards L2 rhythm, most research uses duration-based measures. Indeed, recent L1 studies started examining pitch-based rhythm measures which are still to be explored in L2. Ending with suggestions for future research that address those biases, this chapter aims at promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of L2 prosody.
This chapter reviews available information on the phonetics and phonology of indigenous language bilinguals published in the last few decades, focusing on both of the bilinguals’ languages, the interplay between their phonological systems, and the phonetic realizations of the sounds present in their languages. We understand indigenous languages as predominantly minority languages spoken by linguistically distinct and often socially marginalized and vulnerable ethnic groups, autochthonous to a specific region of the world, and found in diglossias with majority international languages resulting from colonization. Indigenous language bilingualism is usually small-scale and involves speaking at least one minority indigenous language and at least one majority international language, thus being a step toward a seemingly inevitable language shift and in some cases an eventual indigenous language disappearance. The dynamic and asymmetrical character of indigenous bilingualism, along with the vast number of language combinations and the speaker community size differences between the members of these language pairs, sets it apart from other types of bilingualism considered in this book.
Satire and Sentiment’ proposes that the commingling of sentimental and satiric modes in Goldsmith’s oeuvre enables him to negotiate the tension between moral ideals and intractable historical structures, using the movement between sentimental and satiric registers to interrogate the difficulty of living in the face of the political, social, and economic changes in Great Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on novels like The Vicar of Wakefield, ‘spy narratives’ like The Citizen of the World, poems like The Traveller and The Deserted Village, and plays like She Stoops to Conquer, the chapter investigates what might be termed the performative dimension of sentimentality and satire in narrative, poetic, and dramatic forms.
This chapter outlines key developments in effect pedal history since the format’s inception in the 1960s. Centered around fuzz, overdrive, delay, and modulation effects, this chapter considers the technology’s role in how electric guitarists understand tone. Additionally, this chapter details the emergence of more recent playing styles explicitly centered around liberal effect pedal use, especially involving granular or micro loopers. By exploring these various technologies and performance techniques, this chapter suggests that guitar pedals produce not only musical sounds but also knowledge about musical sounds.
We have analyzed many variables in Cantonese but not in other languages: classifier specialization, tone mergers, vowel splits and mergers, motion event expression, and (L > R), as well as (VOT) and (PRODROP). As little sociolinguistic work on any variety of this globally large language exists, these studies serve as useful models to expand variationist studies to languages that vary in many ways from the North American, Indo-European languages of focus to date. We show that classifiers are developing a specific semantic contrast (for number-marking) in Heritage Cantonese, amplifying a homeland trend; that three tone mergers that were reported to be completed are only partial, in both homeland and heritage varieties; that some vowel mergers and splits may be attributed to influence from English, but that changes in the constraints governing motion event expression cannot be attributed to simplification or English-contact effects. We report on covariation among the variables, showing that it is not the case that the same speakers lead change in each. Thus, it is not easy to claim that language proficiency or patterns of use are responsible for the variation. Rather, internal change and identity-marking motivations for change must be considered.
Media coverage can help get your message across to millions, but journalists require careful handling. Here we discover how to write a news release which attracts the attention of a reporter, and ways to make sure a media interview works to your advantage. The chapter also examines how to deal with difficult questions, what to wear for an appearance in the news, and reveals the dirty tricks which some journalists use.
This chapter addresses word stress patterns in Slavic languages. The discussion focuses on the placement of stress and the nature of the accent. Fixed stress systems are discussed (initial, antepenultimate, penultimate) as well as systems with free stress. The chapter also discusses the movement of the stress within inflectional patterns. The discussion furthermore includes the nature of the stress in various Slavic languages. There is also an outline of the laws regulating the patterns of stress in Slavic languages.
The texts in Isaiah 40–66 are widely admired for their poetic brilliance. Situating Isaiah within its historic context, Katie Heffelfinger here explores its literary aspects through a lyrically informed approach that emphasizes key features of the poetry and explains how they create meaning. Her detailed analysis of the text's passages demonstrates how powerful poetic devices, such as paradox, allusion, juxtaposition, as well as word and sound play, are used to great effect via the divine speaking voice, as well as the personified figures of the Servant and Zion. Heffelfinger's commentary includes a glossary of poetic terminology that provides definitions of key terms in non-technical language. It features additional resources, notably, 'Closer Look' sections, which explore important issues in detail; as well as 'Bridging the Horizons' sections that connect Isaiah's poetry to contemporary issues, including migration, fear, and divided society.
Marlo et al. (2015) claim that Kuria verbal tone morphology undermines three well-established principles of locality and modularity: (1) Phonological Locality: the assumption that rules and constraints may only evaluate a small window of phonological objects; (2) Cyclic Locality: the stratal organization of morphophonology into stems, words and phrases; and (3) Indirect Reference: the claim that phonological rules and constraints cannot directly access morphosyntactic information. Sande et al. (2020) turn this claim into an argument for a new model of the morphosyntax–phonology interface, Cophonologies by Phase, which erases the separation between phonology and morphology and abandons standard locality domains in favour of syntactic phases. In this article, I show that the conclusions of both articles are unfounded: the Kuria data follow naturally from an analysis based on autosegmental tone melodies in a version of Stratal Optimality Theory which embraces all three restrictions, Phonological and Cyclic Locality and Indirect Reference, the latter implemented by Coloured Containment Theory. I argue that this approach obviates the technical and conceptual objections raised by Marlo et al. against a tone-melody analysis of Kuria, and makes more restrictive predictions about possible systems of tonal morphophonology compared to construction phonology frameworks.
The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.
Tone is distinct from other phonological phenomena both qualitatively and quantitatively (Hyman 2011), and has been instrumental in shaping phonological theory in many ways. However, the contributions to current linguistic theory of “grammatical tone’ (GT) – a type of non-concatenative morphology where a morpheme is expressed at least in part by tone and/or tone changes – have been less apparent. In this paper, we take stock of the types of GT patterns attested in the literature and the different theoretical treatments of GT that have been proposed to date. We show that GT is still to a large extent underexplored, and highlight the immense potential of the study of GT for improving our understanding of phonology and its outer limits. This paper serves as an introduction to the high-quality research articles collected in this special issue, which directly address how GT critically informs phonological theory and its current developments.
Dagaare is a language of northern Ghana and adjoining areas of Burkina Faso. There are two tones, H and L, and contrastive downstep H!H that involves a non-automatic pitch drop between two H tones. The challenge is to explain the extensive morphological conditioning of tonal processes, including dissimilation, downstep and spreading. Our solution involves level ordering: tones are introduced at different morphological levels (stems, words and phrases) and later processes can make earlier processes opaque. Tonal differences between nouns (spreading) versus verbs (no spreading) and stems (dissimilation) versus words (downstep) arise from constraint ranking differences within and across levels. There are two kinds of downsteps: stem-level downsteps are underlying L tones affiliated with some morpheme; word-level downsteps are L tones inserted by a general process of word-final lowering. Only one downstep per word is allowed. If more would arise, the morphologically inner downstep blocks the morphologically outer downstep.
The complexity of tone can only be appreciated through phonological patterning that unveils structures beyond differences in pitch heights and contour profiles. Following an introduction on tone's ability to express lexical and grammatical contrasts, Section 2 explains that phonetically, fundamental frequency profiles make for the best descriptors. From these descriptions, Section 3 explains how, through postulations of subatomic entities that comprise tones, a language's tone inventory can be quite symmetrical. In looking at tone's independence from the syllable and segments, Section 4 establishes tone as an autosegment. Sections 5, 6, and 7 go on to discuss a myriad of complexities where tones interact with one another and with other phonological entities. Here, the authors offer a suggestion on how some of these interactions can be captured within the same analytical umbrella. Section 8 then peeks into tone's phonological properties through music and poetry.
A major issue in Bantu morphophonology is how to get the right tones in the right ‘cells’ in the verb paradigm. In many Bantu languages, grammatical tones are assigned to different positions in the verb stem depending on inflectional features of tense, aspect, mood (TAM), polarity and clause type: The same TAM may assign different tones (and different segmental allomorphs) in the affirmative vs. negative and in main vs. relative clauses. Although such ‘melodic tones’ (Odden & Bickmore 2014) are typically restricted to the verb stem (root + suffixes), often also the domain of vowel harmony and other segmental phonology, both the presence and mapping of grammatical tones within the stem cannot be determined without reference to the prefixal inflectional marking of subject, negation, TAM and object which precede the stem. In this article, we discuss three cases in Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya, that require the stem-assigned grammatical tones to look ‘outward’ to morphological and phonological properties of such prefixes: (1) differential mapping according to whether the pre-stem tone-bearing unit is toneless, a derived H(igh) (from H-tone spreading), or underlyingly /H/ (Bickmore 1997, 1999); (2) presence of an object prefix in imperative and subjunctive forms and (3) initial/final tone agreement between the subject prefix and the final vowel of the verb (cf. Rolle & Bickmore (2022). We will show that Ekegusii provides extensive evidence that both the presence of grammatical Hs and their specific mapping, while targeting the stem (root + suffixes), must be ‘globally’ calculated on the basis of the entire morphosyntactic structure of the verb (including features exponed by prefixes).
Building on the discussion of suprasegmentals in Chapters 6and 7, this chapter introduces the concept of intonation. The chapter begins by defining intonation both articulatorily and acoustically, with a focus on the relationship among pitch, tone, and intonation. The chapter then provides an overview of methods of analysing intonation, including acoustic analysis and theTone and Break Indices (ToBI) System. The chapter next examines intonational systems in different varieties of English by first describing GAmE and SSBE sentence intonation and pitch accent patterns, to provide a framework through which to examine other varieties. The intonation and pitch accent patterns from different varieties is then discussed, as is the pitch range of different varieties. The chapter then examines two global phenomena in detail – High Rising Terminal on declarative statements, or uptalk; and creaky voice, also commonly called vocal fry. The chapter ends with exercises to check your understanding of the content of the chapter, as well as to expand your knowledge through an analysis of the intonation and pitch accent patterns in your own variety of English.
This chapter will introduce you to the concepts of stress and rhythm in relation to languages and to varieties of English. The chapter begins by defining stress both acoustically and articulatorily, and then examining stress across varieties. This is examined first at the level of the syllable through a focus on strong vs weak syllables in English, and the relationship between strong/weak syllables and stress. The discussion then focuses on the concept of word stress in varieties of English, after which rhythm and pitch accent are introduced, through an examination of stress- and syllable-timing, in different languages as well as varieties of English. This discussion will also present information about the function of stress and pitch accent in various substrate languages for different varieties - such as Cantonese, Malay, Filipino, Spanish, among others - to help you understand the different stress and rhythm patterns that exist across varieties. In the final section of the chapter, you will be guided through exercises designed to check your understanding of the content of the chapter.
Many important and interesting hypotheses about cultural evolution are evaluated using cross-cultural correlations: if knowing one particular feature of a culture (e.g. environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity or parasite load) allows you to predict other features (e.g. language features, religious beliefs, cuisine), it is often interpreted as indicating a causal link between the two (e.g. hotter climates carry greater disease risk, which encourages belief in supernatural forces and favours the use of antimicrobial ingredients in food preparation; dry climates make the production of distinct tones more difficult). However, testing such hypotheses from cross-cultural comparisons requires us to take proximity of cultures into account: nearby cultures share many aspects of their environment and are more likely to be similar in many culturally inherited traits. This can generate indirect associations between environment and culture which could be misinterpreted as signals of a direct causal link. Evaluating examples of cross-cultural correlations from the literature, we show that significant correlations interpreted as causal relationships can often be explained as a result of similarity between neighbouring cultures. We discuss some strategies for sorting the explanatory wheat from the co-varying chaff, distinguishing incidental correlations from causal relationships.
The present study investigated the differential effects of pitched and unpitched musicianship on tone identification and word learning. We recruited 44 Cantonese-pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and non-musicians. They completed a Thai tone identification task and seven sessions of Thai tone word learning. In the tone identification task, the pitched musicians outperformed the non-musicians but the unpitched musicians did not. In session 1 of the tone word learning task, the three groups showed similar accuracies. In session 7, the pitched musicians outperformed the non-musicians but the unpitched musicians did not. The results indicate that the musical advantage in tone identification and word learning hinges on pitched musicianship. From a theoretical perspective, these findings support the precision element of the OPERA hypothesis. Broadly, they reflect the need to consider the heterogeneity of musicianship when studying music-to-language transfer. Practically, the findings highlight the potential of pitched music training in enhancing tone word learning proficiency. Furthermore, the choice of musical instrument may matter to music-to-language transfer.
Features are standard in segmental analysis but have been less successfully applied to tone. Subtonal features have even been argued to be less satisfactory for the representation of African tone than tonal primitives such as H, M, L (Hyman 2010; Clements et al.2010). I argue that the two-feature system of Yip (1980) and Pulleyblank (1986) offers a straightforward account of the tonology of Laal, an endangered, three-tone isolate of southern Chad – in particular properties of the Mid tone that are otherwise difficult to account for, namely the avoidance of complex patterns involving M, and a pervasive M-to-L lowering process, both straightforwardly analysed as subtonal assimilation. Other tonal operations in Laal are shown to involve full-tone behaviour, justifying a tone geometry à la Snider (1999, 2020) where subtonal features are linked to a Tonal Root Node, giving tones the ability to be either fully or partially active, just like segments.