Structure of Spoken Language

About this book

"Using an innovative approach, this book focuses on a widely debated area of phonetics and phonology: intonation, and specifically its relation to metrics, its interface with syntax, and whether it can be attributed more to phonetics or phonology, or equally to both. Drawing on data from six Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian), whose rich intonation patterns have long been of interest to linguists, J-Philippe Martin challenges the assumptions of traditional phonological approaches, and re-evaluates the data in favour of a new usage-based model of intonation. He proposes a unified description of the sentence prosodic structure, focusing on the dynamic and cognitive aspects of both production and perception of intonation in speech, leading to a unified grammar of Romance languages' sentence intonation. This book will be welcomed by researchers and advanced students in phonetics and phonology"-- "One of the most remarkable features of phonation is the disruption of the normal respiratory cycle. Indeed, outside phonation, the normal cycle of respiration presents a comparable duration for both the inspiration and the expiration (top of Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1 Respiration cycle, without phonation (top) and with phonation (bottom) The first produced prosodic units are breath groups. At early stages of language learning, children mainly use the necessary silent pause in the inspiration phase of their respiratory cycle as boundary markers of these units. The phonation process results from the air flow generated by the lung compression during the respiration-expiration phase. This air flow generates the necessary subglottal pressure needed to produce the vibration of the vocal folds for voiced sounds (vowels, voiced consonants), friction for fricative consonants, and intraoral pressure to allow the production of stop consonants"--