This dissertation documents and analyzes phonetic and phonological features of Gua, an under-documented, understudied and nearly-endangered Guang language, spoken in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The language has two dialects, Anum and Boso. The data for this dissertation is from the Boso dialect spoken in the Boso community. The dissertation…

Many languages have processes which lengthen or shorten a vowel or consonant. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Open Syllable Lengthening, Closed Syllable Shortening, Monosyllabic Lengthening and Trochaic Lengthening, and present a formal model which captures these lengthenings and shortening as the insertion, deletion or reassignment of a…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…

The pace of speech i.e. tempo can be varied to our mood of the moment. Fast speech can convey urgency, whereas slower speech can be used for emphasis. In public speaking, orators produce powerful effects by varying the loudness and pace of their speech. The juxtaposition of very loud and very quiet utterances is a device often used by those trying…

This study provides a systematic phonetic analysis of the basic entities of Kabardian prosodic units above the word and investigates the predictability of prosodic units from grammatical and discourse factors. This dissertation is the first extensive description of Kabardian prosody and grammar based on natural data. This study proposes that…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

This paper outlines a method of auditory and acoustic analysis for determining the tonemes of a language starting from scratch, drawing on the author's experience of recording and analyzing tone languages of north-east India. The methodology is applied to a preliminary analysis of tone in the Thang dialect of Khiamniungan, a virtually undocumented…

North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) is a pitch accent language in which each word has one of a restricted set of possible tonal patterns, and where the tonal pattern of a given lexical word is not fully predictable. This dissertation reports on a corpus study of accent patterns in existing words and the results of a study in which NKK speakers were asked…

This dissertation investigates the prosodic and intonational characteristics of Western Cham (three letter code for International Organization for Standardization's ISO 639-3 code: [iso=cja]), an Austronesian language in the Chamic sub-group. I examine acoustic variables of prominence at word and postlexical levels: syllable duration, pitch…

This paper explores the interaction of tone and syntax in Rutooro, a Bantu language of Western Uganda. Rutooro has lost its lexical tone but retains a phrasally defined high pitch that appears on the penultimate syllable--the default position in Bantu. This high pitch can work grammatically and in fact distinguishes between the noun phrase vs.…

This study of 15 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment and 2 comparison groups tentatively supported the notion that grammatical morphemes were less difficult for subjects if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be…

In an analysis of stress and intonation, stress is shown to distinguish semantic and grammatical meaning on every level of language. It is suggested that the distinction between stress and intonation is particularly important in teaching English as a second language. Written texts and fabricated examples of dialogue are used, with a focus on…

The chief purposes of this book are the illustration of an analytical approach to tone languages, a methodology based upon recent linguistic advance, and the presentation of firsthand data on Mixteco and Mazateco, languages which represent two very different structural arrangements of linguistic tone. Part 1 describes some of the types of…