The processes of gemination, lenition, and vowel lengthening are central to the study of phonology, as they reveal much about the treatment of quantity in a given language. Using data from older language stages, modern dialects and standard languages, this study examines the interdependence of vowel and consonant quantity in the history of the Germanic branch of Indo-European. Kurt Goblirsch focusses on the various geminations in Old Germanic languages (West Germanic gemination, glide strengthening, and expressive gemination), open syllable lengthening in German, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Scandinavian languages, and the major lenitions in High German, Low German, and Danish, as well as minor lenitions in Bavarian, Franconian, and Frisian dialects. All of these changes are related to the development of the Germanic languages from distinctive segmental length to complementary length to syllable cut. The discussion challenges traditional theoretical assumptions about quantity change in Germanic languages to argue for a new account whereby, gemination, lenition, and vowel lengthening are interrelated.

An essential, comprehensive guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet, for phoneticians and others concerned with speech.

This comprehensive collection equips readers with a state-of-the-art description of clinical phonetics and a practical guide on how to employ phonetic techniques in disordered speech analysis. Divided into four sections, the manual covers the foundations of phonetics, sociophonetic variation and its clinical application, clinical phonetic transcription, and instrumental approaches to the description of disordered speech. The book offers in-depth analysis of the instrumentation used in articulatory, auditory, perceptual, and acoustic phonetics and provides clear instruction on how to use the equipment for each technique as well as a critical discussion of how these techniques have been used in studies of speech disorders. With fascinating topics such as multilingual sources of phonetic variation, principles of phonetic transcription, speech recognition and synthesis, and statistical analysis of phonetic data, this is the essential companion for students and professionals of phonetics, phonology, language acquisition, clinical linguistics, and communication sciences and disorders.

Includes Proceedings of the Society.

Phonetic transcription is a key element in many kinds of written works, not least linguistics books, dictionaries, language-teaching texts and bilingual reference works. This book is the first book-length scholarly monograph to address all of the important aspects of phonetic transcription.The aim of phonetic transcription is to represent the sounds of speech on paper. This book reviews contemporary uses of phonetic transcription in dictionaries, language teaching texts, phonetic and phonological studies, dialectology and sociolinguistics, speech pathology and therapy, and forensic phonetics. Heselwood surveys the history of attempts to represent speech, considering the relationship of transcription to written language. The book also includes a thorough analysis of the many different kinds of phonetic transcription - broad, narrow, auditory, systematic, segmental, suprasegmental, parametric and others - addressing what exactly is represented in different kinds and levels of transcription.Different ways in which transcription can be used alongside modern instrumental records of speech are illustrated with the claim that transcription embodies a kind of knowledge about speech unavailable to instruments - knowledge gained from the experience of listening to it in a phonetically informed manner. The author grounds this claim in the philosophy of phenomenalism, countering arguments against auditory transcription that have been advanced by experimental phoneticians for reasons of empirical inadequacy, and by linguistic rationalists who say it is irrelevant for understanding the supposedly innate categories that are said to underlie speech. A glossary of terms is included, along with a series of examples to demonstrate the comparison, classification and interpretation of phonetic transcriptions for different purposes.