Glossary
This glossary defines terms as used in Laurence White's PhD
dissertation English speech timing: a domain and locus approach
(see DISSERTATION page for the full text). All section references are to this
dissertation; other cited works are listed in full in the bibliography
of the dissertation.
Glossary contents
Accentual lengthening
- The phrase-level prominence indicated by a pitch accent is
associated with significant lengthening of the accented syllable and
neighbouring syllables within the word (Sluijter 1995; Turk and
Sawusch 1997; Turk and White 1999). See dissertation Section 2.5 for discussion of
previous findings and Section 4.9 for further results.
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Dissertation
- The dissertation referred to on the EUSTACE web pages is:
White, L.S. 2002. English speech timing: a domain and locus
approach. University of Edinburgh PhD dissertation.
See
DISSERTATION page for the full text.
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Domain
- The concept of the domain is a familiar one in prosodic phonology
- the study of connected speech processes - as presented, for example,
by Selkirk 1986 and by Nespor & Vogel 1986. As used in the dissertation, it refers to any stretch of
speech - typically, a constituent such as the word or the intonational
phrase - which causes systematic durational variation in
sub-constituents, by virtue of the size of the domain (a domain-span process) or the position of the
subconstituents within that domain (domain-span process).
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Compensatory shortening
- As described in dissertation Section
4.5.2, the term ``compensatory'' is used here to characterise
durational effects in which some constituent shortens apparently as a
result of lengthening elsewhere, whatever the underlying
interpretation of the effect.
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Domain-edge process
- Durational effects associated with constituent boundaries are
typically characterised as ``lengthening'', where segments at the
boundary have greater duration than similar segments placed
constituent-medially, such as word-initial lengthening (for example:
Oller 1973; Cooper 1991) or phrase-final lengthening (for example:
Oller 1973; Klatt 1975; Wightman et al. 1992). In the domain-and-locus description
presented in the dissertation, these are
characterised as ``domain-edge'' processes. Section 2.2 includes a
discussion of previous research on domain-edge processes and Chapter 4
presents an experiment which finds evidence for domain-edge processes
at the word-level and the utterance-level (or the
intonational-phrase-level).
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Domain-span process
- An inverse relationship between the length of some constituent,
typically in number of syllables, and the duration of some
subconstituent: as characterised in the dissertation, there is an inverse relationship
between the length of the domain and the duration
of the locus. A number of units have been held to
be domains of such processes, both syntactic/prosodic constituents
such as the word (polysyllabic
shortening), and the sentence/utterance
(for example: Lehiste 1974; Rakerd et al. 1987). Dissertation
Section 2.2 includes a discussion of previous research on domain-span
processes and Chapter 4 presents an experiment investigating
word-level and utterance-level domain-span (and domain-edge) processes, and finds little
evidence for domain-span processes.
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Left-headed
- Left-headed words have the primary stress as the first syllable
of the word: for example mason, thankful,
captaincy, censorship. For the purposes of experimental
design in the dissertation, monosyllabic
words may be described as left-headed if they comprise a stressed
syllable which is also the word-initial primary stress in disyllabic
or trisyllabic words in the experimental materials. For example,
mace, mason and masonry form a left-headed
keyword triad in the experiment described in Chapter 4.
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Locus
- The domain represents the cause in the
description of some durational process; the locus represents the
effect - thus, the locus is the stretch of speech within which
durational variation is manifest. It is hypothesised in the dissertation that the loci of domain-edge and
domain-span processes are phonologically defined. Thus, for example,
the locus of word-initial lengthening appears to be the word-initial
syllable onset (for example: Oller 1973; Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel
2000); the locus of phrase-final (or utterance-final lengthening)
appears to be the word-rhyme, beginning with a primary-stressed
syllable nucleus and extending to a word boundary (see dissertation
Chapter 4).
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Polysyllabic shortening
- A stressed syllable is held to have greatest duration in a
monosyllabic word, and to become shorter as more syllables are added
within the word. For example, /stIk/ is longest in
stick, shorter in sticky and shorter still in
stickiness (Lehiste 1972; see also Port 1981). Previous
experiments finding evidence for polysyllabic shortening are reviewed
in dissertation Section 2.2 and Section 3.1;
an experiment presented in Chapter 4 finds little evidence of the
process than could not be more simply explained as a result of a domain-edge process or processes.
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Right-headed
- Right-headed words have the primary stress as the last syllable
of the word: for example fulfil, enforce,
condescend, inhumane. For the purposes of experimental
design in the dissertation, monosyllabic
words may be described as right-headed if they comprise a stressed
syllable which is also the word-final primary stress in disyllabic or
trisyllabic words in the experimental materials. For example,
send, descend and condescend form a right-headed
keyword triad in the experiment described in Chapter 4.
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Stress-adjacent
lengthening
- Variation in stressed syllable duration due to the number of
following unstressed syllables is characterised as stress-adjacent
lengthening in the dissertation. For
example, Rakerd et al. (1987) find that the duration of the
first of a pair of adjacent stressed syllables is greater than when an
unstressed syllable intervenes: thus, the duration of the syllable
peach is greater in peach light than in peach
delight. This effect has also been described as ``foot-level
shortening'' (for example, by Rakerd et al.), but a review in
dissertation Section 2.4 suggests little evidence for further
shortening due to more than one unstressed syllable intervening between
stressed syllables.
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Utterance
- The utterance may be defined as a pause-delimited and relatively
self-contained stretch of speech. Typically, experiments on durational
variation in speech feature a series of unconnected sentences read in sequence
and each of these is likely to comprise a single utterance. The
evidence for the phonological utterance as a prosodic constituent (for
example: Nespor & Vogel 1986) is discussed in dissertation Section 2.3; the experiment in
Chapter 4 includes an examination of utterance-level durational
processes; Section 5.3 concludes that there is, as yet, insufficient
evidence for stating that the utterance is a distinct domain of durational processes.
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Word
- Word-level processes such as polysyllabic shortening and
word-initial lengthening are examined at the lexical-word level in the
research described here. The relationship between syntactic words -
that is, lexical and functional words - and possible prosodic words is
not directly tested. Important theoretical issues in this mapping are
the prosodic status of function words and the prosodic structure of
lexical compounds, as discussed by, for example, Nespor & Vogel (1986)
and Selkirk (1996) - this research is reviewed in dissertation Section 2.3.
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Word-rhyme-span compression
- The ``word-rhyme'' is defined in dissertation Section 3.5 as beginning with a
primary stressed syllable and extending to a word boundary. Evidence
is found in the experiment reported in Chapter 4 of an inverse
relationship between the number of syllables in the word-rhyme and the
duration of the primary stressed syllable nucleus. This could be
interpreted as a domain-span process at the word-rhyme level, termed
``word-rhyme-span compression'', or more simply ``word-rhyme
compression''; it is argued in Chapter 5, however, that it may be
better interpreted as arising from a word-final lengthening process.
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