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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod


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Title: Shanghai Tonetics
Written By: Sean Xiaonong Zhu
URL: http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA
Series Title: LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 32
Description:

This study presents the first multi-speaker acoustic investigation into the citation tones on monosyllables (Chapters 4 to 8) and the sandhi tones on disyllables (Chapter 10) in Shanghai Chinese. It shows that using many speakers is necessary not only for phonetics, but also phonology. Both citation and disyllabic tones are described in terms of the following dimensions: raw duration, normalised duration, raw fundamental frequency, and normalised fundamental frequency. Citation tones are also described in raw intensity and normalised intensity. The acoustic data collected from many speakers show, among other thing, a great amount of between-speaker variations. To factor out these variations, various normalisation methods for fundamental frequency, intensity and duration are explored, and an appropriate one is developed. Its superiority to the existing ones is demonstrated. It is shown that highly constant patterns underlie the very considerable surface variations. Only after these variations have been substantially reduced, can a tonetic model be proposed in order to sufficiently characterise the tones in a linguistic variety and, hopefully, to make between-variety comparison. To account for the between-tone fundamental frequency variations in disyllabic tone sandhi (Chapter 10), a coordinate shift procedure is developed and four phonetic realisation rules are formulised. These reveal the underlying uniformity and simplicity of complicated surface manifestations. In addition, some phonological issues are discussed, especially the word geometry suggested for Shanghai phonology (Chapter 2), and the relationship between phonetics and phonology (Chapter 11).

Publication Year: 1999
Publisher: Lincom GmbH
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BibTex: View BibTex record
Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
Phonology
Subject Language(s): Chinese, Mandarin

Versions:
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 3895865842
ISBN-13: N/A
Pages: 200 p
Prices: USD 60 / DM 107 / 38