LINGUIST List 9.355

Wed Mar 11 1998

Qs: Diphthongs,O-E ligature,Contrast rhet.,Software

Editor for this issue: Brett Churchill <brettlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Dr James M Scobbie, short diphthongs
2. BL, Small capital O-E ligature
3. Leonor Perez Ruiz, Contrastive Rhetoric in English and Spanish
4. Hiwis, Linguistic software

Is anyone currently doing any work on short diphthongs, either descriptive
or theoretical who would like to discuss them on email? 

By short diphthongs, I mean the language should have a pair of 
contrastive diphthongs which pattern with monophthongal long/short pairs 
(and it's ok if the monophthongal pairs are allophones). A length contrast
in diphthongs will typically have phonetic correlates that are both durational
and qualitative.

Short/long allophonic diphthong phenomena are also of interest.

The interest theoretically is that most models of syllable structure find
short diphthongs hard to integrate, particularly if they are bimoraic (and
able, for example, to satisfy a bimoraic minimal word contraint).

Jim Scobbie

According to Pullum & Ladusaw (Phonetic symbol guide. - Chicago,
1986, p. 116) the low front rounded vowel indicated by IPA small
capital O-E ligature "has not as yet been found to occur in any
language as a phoneme separate from o-e [ligature]".
Does anybody know now of any language where it does occur, and if
so, could you lead me to a publication where this is attested?

In fact, exactly this vowel is part of the most frequent
diphthong [O-Ei] in the Volendam dialect of Dutch.

Thanks for your help
Sijmen Tol
****************************************************
Linguistic Bibliography / Bibliographie Linguistique
Sijmen Tol, editor
PO Box 90407
NL-2509 LK The Hague, The Netherlands
tel.: +31-70-3140345; fax: +31-70-3140450
e-mail: blkonbib.nl
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I am currently working on Contrastive Rhetoric. I am
comparing research articles of different genres written in
English and Spanish. Does anyone know of any other similar
studies, thesis or literature? 

Thank you very much.

I would be very grateful if anybody has information on software for the
following tasks:

1. Linking existing transcripts with digitalized sound data, so the text is
displayed at the same time that the sound files are played back. Ideally it
should be software that can recognize and time pauses. The files are audio
only.

2. Rating the vocabulary complexity of texts (German and English). Is there
any software that can 'index' words within a written text for their
vocabulary complexity (for example, for second-language-learners, would a
word be 'beginner', 'intermediate' or 'advanced') so you can arrive at an
index of overall lexical competence?

I would very much appreciate any help! I will post a sumamry to the list.

Please address your reply to: schmidphil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de

Thank you!

Monika S. Schmid