Experimental phonetics in phonology: Vowel duration in Thai.
| Number | 172 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1974 |
| Drawer | 3 |
| Entry Date | 07/09/1998 |
| Authors | Abramson, A. S. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Pasaa, 4, 71-89. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0172.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction] Up to a few years ago, experimental phoneticians, even those whose disciplinary base was linguistics, were not well received by linguists. The effort to unravel the mechanisms used in the production and perception of speech seemed to have little to offer the linguist writing the description of a language. Even for the phonological part of the grammar, he was sure that he could depend upon his training in auditory and articulatory phonetics to determine what phonetic features enabled speakers of the language under analysis to differentiate utterances. Many were probably influenced by Leonard Bloomfield (1933:127-28), who seemed to feel that this was the proper approach until such time as we had a full and trustworthy scientific description of speech from the laboratory of the future. The reluctance of the linguist to embrace the methods and findings of the laboratory phonetician may have stemmed in part from the fact that for some decades most experimentalist were drawn from the fields of acoustics, communications engineering, physiology, psychology and speech pathology. Members of these disciplines were usually not well grounded in principles of linguistic theory and seldom went out of their way to make it clear to the linguist that they had something of relevance to offer. The linguist, for his part, was guilty, perhaps, of failing to see that the study of linguistic phenomena was not exclusively his concern. The typical linguist apparently did not understand that even while playing a central role in coming to grips with the nature of language, he was going to have to depend upon interdisciplinary cooperation for discoveries that would hasten him on the road toward full enlightenment. Such and interdisciplinary group came into being at the Haskins Laboratories in the early 1950’s, but its pioneering work found a home in the pages of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (e.g., Cooper 1950, Cooper et al. 1952) and some of the psychological journals rather than in organs aimed at a linguistic readership. In the late fifties and early sixties, at least in the United States of America, the few of us with credentials in linguistics who made so bold as to take experimental phonetics seriously, found a good form for the presentation of oral papers on our research not at meetings of the Linguistic Society of America but at meetings of the Acoustical Society of America and, thanks to the zeal of the late Pierre Delattre, the Modern Language Association of America. During that era, it must be said, phoneticians with strong linguistic interests were welcome to present oral reports for discussion at the meetings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, if they were prepared to travel to one country or another every three or four years. Also, certain Continental and British journals dedicated to studies of speech and linguistic communication were very receptive to linguistically oriented articles on phonetics at a time when most journals of general linguistics were not. Happily, during those years, the notion that experimental phonetics had a role to play in linguistics receive occasional encouragement. As an example, let me bring to mind how the advent of the sound spectrograph during World War II (Koening et al. 1946) and its early use by and American linguist, Martin Joos, led to the publication of Acoustic Phonetics (Joos 1948), a monograph which stimulated much of the thinking about speech acoustics and its relation to language structure among the few linguists of the immediately following decade who immersed themselves in experimental phonetic research. Today there can be no question but that linguists are much more reluctant to ignore the data and inferences of the experimentalist even though, as D.B.Fry (In press) has so effectively stated, there has been in this century a series of wide swings between theory and observation in linguistics. Meetings of the Linguistic Society of America now frequently have a noticeable number of experimental papers on the program. More and more departments of linguistics see fit to give their students basic training in the physiology, acoustics and perception of speech. What, then does the experimental phonetician have to offer to linguistics? On the most basic level, he can supply phonetic data to the phonologist. That is, before the phonologist posits a particular set of gestures as distinctive, let him be aware of the complex of intersecting phonetic features actually involved in the production of a given expression. This alone will prevent so much of the phonetic vagueness and even naivete that one often finds in descriptions of languages. At a higher level, the experimental phonetician stands ready to test hypotheses as to the communicative relevance of distinctive features that have been posited. Surely the disinterested objectivity of the laboratory is to be encouraged in a discipline that likes to think of itself as a science. Indeed, there are welcome signs that in the hands of the psycholinguists this approach is beginning to be applied in the realms of syntax (Greenbaum & Quirk 1970) and semantics (Goldman-Eisler 1968). |
| Notes |
Search Publications