Accent

The study focuses on the concept of the “native speaker” and the “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy. It recognizes the “native speaker” concept primarily as a political and ideological construct and the “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy mainly as a basis for division and discrimination. The study believes that a strict adherence to “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy as a framework of analysis in linguistics, especially applied linguistics, overlooks certain alternative ways of understanding the speakership of a given language and the possibility of there being covert but more intense forms of language-based division and discrimination. Based on the findings of empirical research conducted at Ohio University in 2011/2012, involving 173 Ohio University undergraduates who considered themselves “native speakers” of English, the study recognizes certain patterns that indicate that the divisions within the “native speaker” category are stronger and more intense than the divis...

It has been argued that depending on gender language is used in different ways in society, and the fact that language is surveyed differently leads to the thesis that men and women have ‘differentiated communicative competence’ (Coates, 2004). A distinct pronunciation variant that is widely used and ‘has recently been noted as spreading through non-standard accents in England’ (cf. Trudgill, 1988: 43), is that of th-fronting. The form th- fronting has become more and more integrated into the speech patterns of many speakers across the United Kingdom although it has ‘not ‘officially’ entered RP yet’ (Altendorf, 1999: 5). This study focused on whether or not gender is associated with variation in the usage of th-fronting in the urban and multicultural locality of Nottingham, United Kingdom. The analysis was undertaken in order to assess how urban youth culture in Nottingham utilizes and applies the form th-fronting in everyday dialogue such as day-to-day conversations, and whether their mode of expression varies according to gender. The study aimed to gain an insight into the relationship between spoken language and identity, and to recognise whether the social backgrounds/ cultural practices people have influence their use of ethnically and age-coded variables. From the results, it was established that th-fronting does vary according to gender and that increased formality does limit the amount of th-fronting used.

There are many languages that are spoken by different peoples in the world. These languages have some similarities and differences. Owning distinct dialects and accents is one of the similarities. French, Spanish, German have both dialects and accents. As these languages, the English language owns dialects and accents as well. These dialects and accents vary in some ways. The dialects vary in terms of phonological, morphological, syntactic/grammatical, and semantic/lexical aspects, while age, gender, pronunciation, social situation affect the variation of accents.

The paper discusses the reflexes of the Proto-Slavic i-verbs accentual paradigms in Croatian (Štokavian/Čakavian/Kajkavian) dialects, with special regards to the reflexes of the a. p. b1 and b2, as well as to a Štokavian/Čakavian a. p. c > B: transfer. The paper provides a great amount of accentological data for the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-European accent.

French below
The accent, the intonation, the use of a foreign language are never insignificant in a song and even more so in a film. The aim here is to problematize the so-called "suburb" spoken language in French cinema and to evaluate the sociolinguistic consequences of this language on the populations concerned. To do this, the selected corpus will be analyzed via praxematics, theory according to which the lexical unit, the "praxeme", is defined by the use that the person makes of it in a given situation, according to a given enunciative environment. The method of analysis derived from this theory therefore gives particular attention to the discourse and to the different stages of its elaboration.

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L’accent, l’intonation, le recours à une langue étrangère ne sont jamais anodins dans une chanson ni à plus forte raison dans un film. On s’attache ici à problématiser le parler dit « de banlieue » dans le cinéma français et à évaluer les retombées sociolinguistiques de ce parler sur les populations concernées. Pour ce faire, le corpus retenu sera analysé via la praxématique, théorie selon laquelle l’unité lexicale, le « praxème », se définit par l’usage que la personne en fait dans une situation donnée, en fonction d’un certain environnement énonciatif ; la méthode d’analyse découlant de cette théorie accorde donc un intérêt particulier au discours et aux différentes étapes de son élaboration.

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
"

[Paper in French]
The study of the evidence provided by the comparison of forms in different Berber languages leads to the following conclusions:
1) An ancient phase of Berber possessed a strong dynamic stress, capable to provoke lengthening and shortening of vowels according to its place;
2) The place of accent depended on the length of a phonetic word: when suffixes were added, the accent shifted towards the end;
3) preservation and dropping of vowels according to the place of accent should also be taken into account when reconstructing Protoberber "short" and "long" vowels.

پژوهش حاضر با هدف آشکار ساختن تفاوت‌های نظام آهنگ زبان فارسی و نظام آهنگ زبان ژاپنی، برای استفاده در گستره‌های زبان‌شناسی مقابله‌ای و آموزش زبان انجام پذیرفت. نخست یک توصیف مرجع از نظام آهنگ هریک از دو زبان در چارچوب نظریه تحقیق برگزیده شد و نظام آهنگ دو زبان در قالب این دو توصیف مطالعه و مقابله شد و تفاوتی ساختاری بین دو زبان در قالب یک فرضیه برای تحقیق مطرح شد که عبارت بود از وجود تکیة ‌زیر و بمی هسته‌ای Nuclear Pitch Accent (NPA) در فارسی و عدم وجود آن در ژاپنی. سپس داده‌هایی که نمایندة کلیة ساخت‌های نواختی وکلیة الگوهای آهنگی دو زبان بودند، جمع‌آوری شد و از پنج دانشجوی زبان ژاپنی در ایران و پنج دانشجوی زبان فارسی در ژاپن خواسته شد تا تمامی داده‌ها را در محیط آزمایشگاهی بخوانند. پس از بررسی و تجزیه و تحلیل منحنی‌های زیر و بمی پاره‌گفتارهای ضبط شده، مشخص شد که در هر گروه آهنگی فارسی یکی از گروه‌های تکیه‌ای دارندة تکیة ‌زیر و بمی هسته‌ای است و برجسته‌تر از سایر گروه‌ها ادراک می‌شود. درحالی‌که در زبان ژاپنی تکیة‌ واژگانی کلیة کلمات در کلام تظاهر می‎‌یابند و هیچ واحدی برجسته‌تر از سایر واحدها تولید و ادراک نمی‌شود.

http://tinyurl.com/zks5uwz
This article considers the chronological flow of Schoenberg’s chordal atonal music, using melodic contour and other contextual features to prioritize some chordal events over others. These non- consecutive chords are tracked and compared for their coloristic contrasts, producing an unfolding akin to Klangfarbenmelodie, but paced more like a narrative trajectory in a drama. The dramatic pacing enhances discernment of nuance among atonal dissonant chords, thereby emancipating them from subordinate obscurity to vivid distinctness. Thus Schoenberg’s music is strategically configured to differentiate its own pitch material. This approach is theorized in terms of representational hierarchy association (RHA) among chords, and demonstrated in analyses of Op. 11, No. 2, Op. 21, No. 4, and Op. 19, No. 3. In support, the analyses consider: (1) the combinatorics of voicing as effecting contrasts of timbre; (2) an application of Lewin’s Binary State Generalized Interval System (GIS) to melodic contour and motivic transformation based on binary-state switching; (3) Klumpenhouwer Networks to model chord-to-chord connections hierarchically; and (4) the role of pitch-class set genera (families of chords) in projecting a palindromic arch form.

It has been argued that depending on gender language is used in different ways in society, and the fact that language is surveyed differently leads to the thesis that men and women have ‘differentiated communicative competence’ (Coates, 2004). A distinct pronunciation variant that is widely used and ‘has recently been noted as spreading through non-standard accents in England’ (cf. Trudgill, 1988: 43), is that of th-fronting. The form th- fronting has become more and more integrated into the speech patterns of many speakers across the United Kingdom although it has ‘not ‘officially’ entered RP yet’ (Altendorf, 1999: 5). This study focused on whether or not gender is associated with variation in the usage of th-fronting in the urban and multicultural locality of Nottingham, United Kingdom. The analysis was undertaken in order to assess how urban youth culture in Nottingham utilizes and applies the form th-fronting in everyday dialogue such as day-to-day conversations, and whether their mode of expression varies according to gender. The study aimed to gain an insight into the relationship between spoken language and identity, and to recognise whether the social backgrounds/ cultural practices people have influence their use of ethnically and age-coded variables.

A partir de travaux de terrain menes depuis une dizaine d'annees, le texte propose une reflexion sur les processus de segregation sociolinguistique a l'œuvre aujourd'hui a Marseille. Apres une presentation de la cesure « historique » nord/sud expliquee par la configuration et les peuplements de la ville, l'attention se portera au-dela des territoires traditionnellement stigmatises (les « quartiers Nord ») pour s'interesser a d'autres cibles de segregation sociolinguistique : les « bourgeois » de Marseille et leur gestion ambigue de l'accent local, ainsi que les « neo-Marseillais » arrives massivement dans les annees 2000, aux strategies identitaires complexes. Il s'agit ainsi d'observer dans quelle mesure les changements urbains (recents ou inscrits dans une longue duree) et la mobilite accrue de groupes sociaux inegalement repartis dans l'espace (notamment a travers un processus de gentrification), modifient les dynamiques sociolinguistiques ...

The study focuses on the concept of the “native speaker” and the “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy.  It recognizes the “native speaker” concept primarily as a political and ideological construct and the “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy mainly as a basis for division and discrimination.  The study believes that a strict adherence to “native”/“nonnative speaker” dichotomy as a framework of analysis in linguistics, especially applied linguistics, overlooks certain alternative ways of understanding the speakership of a given language and the possibility of there being covert but more intense forms of language-based division and discrimination.  Based on the findings of empirical research conducted at Ohio University in 2011/2012, involving 173 Ohio University undergraduates who considered themselves “native speakers” of English, the study recognizes certain patterns that indicate that the divisions within the “native speaker” category are stronger and more intense than the division between the “native speaker” and “nonnative speaker” categories.

The talk is devoted to the derivation of word order and intonation of Russian thetic sentences in the framework of generative-transformational grammar and formal typology.
Following statements on the data are made.
1. Modern Russian is a SVO language with scrambling of arguments. VS-word orders are attested both in thetic and categorical sentences and possible with all verb classes – unaccusatives, unergatives and transitives. VS, VSO, VOS-orders can be linked with different types of information structure, so that each word order allows two or more different communicative readings [Kovtunova 1976].
2. Russian is a language with direct accent marking of communicative constituents (theme, rheme, focus of contrast etc.). The theme in Russian declaratives gets a characteristic accent marking, the so called Intonation Construction 3 (IC-3) – steep rise with a fall on post-tonics (LH*L-L%). The same intonation construction albeit in a higher register and wider range is used for marking Russian yes-no questions [Ode 2003].
3. There are two subtypes of Russian thetic sentences – context-independent sentences like Vesna prišla (SV)~ Prišla vesna (VS) ‘The spring came’ and context-dependent sentences called ‘sentences with an inherent theme’ in the Russian linguistic tradition, e.g. <Tixo! > Babuška spit ‘<Quiet!> Grandma is asleep’ [Baranov, Kobozeva 1983]. Both subtypes can be realized both with SV and VS-orders. Both subtypes lack an accented theme marked with IC-3 [Yanko 2001]. Russian allows transitive thetic sentences, they mostly fall with the context-dependent subtype, cf. example (1).

Voice education is interdisciplinary individual education, which
consists of sub-matters like speaking and singing.  It is also an
education in which the individuals acquire the necessary behaviors to use their voices in compatible with the anatomical and physiologicalstructures, while they are speaking and singing. On the other hand, speech training is defined as "diction", "oratory", "rhetoric" which is doctrines in Turkish language for this purpose. The person who wants to talk with clear diction and to use his language in a appropriate way
and express himself properly, has to understand and apply voice and breath control and has to acquire knowledge about phonetic, accent, intonation and enclisis. People who earns money through speaking as in advocators, public speaker, politicians and teachers, should learn to keep their voices for a healthy voice. To make people to use innate speaking ability in an accurate and ordered way, speaking education possession in school life is crucial. General purpose of speaking lessons
in the educational institution is to gain effective and fitting individual expression ability through the student’s opinion, observation, ambition and desires. Starting from these point students should understand the main structure and function of respiratory systems, diaphragm and abdominal muscles, larynx muscles and voice tube. Speaking education’s theoretical content is finding practical corresponds in voice education through breath management exercises. The kinship between
voice and speaking education is the relationship between the theoretical content of speaking education and practical content of vocal education, which relies on the melody of speaking. This article is a descriptive review which contains kinship of voice and speaking education.

Drawing on the field of Brazilian popular music and its internationalization, the work of some key Brazilian and French theorists of song and oral poetry, and on my own translation practice, this essay offers a radical new approach to song translation. I first sketch out an ethics of song translation within the broader political context of postcolonial debates about globalization, cosmopolitanism and intercultural translation. I then examine the language-music relationship and its implications for song translation, not as a matter of compromise between competing criteria of semantic information, form and "singability", as is sometimes suggested, but rather as a unified, convergent project focused on enacting the composition's melodic-discursive unfolding in time as movement, as language-in-song. Finally, I explore in some detailed examples how formal and performative challenges might be integrated together in the translator's approach to questions of inflection, rhythm, time and persona.

In this paper we investigate historically aspects of the morphology–phonology interface with regard to the definition of the accent position in ancient Greek nominal forms. More specifically our aim is to study: (a) the extent to which morphology may set the accent position of the nominal forms; and (b) the role of the nominal accent to the definition of morphological categories like the inflectional class. More specifically, we argue that the nominal accent is defined by reference to a number of abstract Accent Patterns which are organized on the inherent accentual information of the lexical bases and controlled by morphological factors such as the structural oppositions between the strong and weak cases. Any violation of these patterns is due to the morphology–phonology interface. On the other hand, their strict relation to the lexical bases opens the way for their use as tools for the definition of the inflectional classes.

It has been known that in Languages like English, when there are multiple accents in an utterance, the final accent is perceived more prominently than the non-final ones. Bolinger (1986:58) argues the intuition that the final accent is the most prominent one is nothing but an illusion. Ladd (1996: 267) also maintains that there is no clear phonetic justification for treating the last accent in a sentence as the most prominent one. These perspectives regard the final accents to be perceived more prominently, only because they are not followed by any audible prominence in the utterance. On the other hand, Silverman and Pierrehumbert (1990) report that in English, non-final peaks often occur after the syllable with which they are intuitively associated.
This study investigates the phonetic differences between non-final (pre-nuclear) and final (nuclear) accents in Persian, by conducting production and perception experiments. Production experiments measure and compare the acoustic parameters such as f0, duration, overall intensity, spectral balance and vowel quality in nuclear accented and pre-nuclear accented words, by analyzing non-words uttered by native speakers. In perception experiments, manipulated stimuli are used to examine how much manipulation of which acoustic parameters can render a nuclear accented word to be perceived as a pre-nuclear accented one by native listeners.
The production experiments revealed that the f0 peak on the syllables which are associated with a nuclear accent tends to occur at the middle of the syllable, while the f0 peak on the syllables associated with a pre-nuclear accent tends to occur at the right edge of the syllable. This difference between the shapes of the pitch curves can be regarded as a consequence of f0 peak delays in pre-nuclear accents. Production experiments also showed that syllables associated with a nuclear accent are significantly longer than the syllables associated with a pre-nuclear one.
The results of the Perception experiments revealed that Persian listeners can distinguish the two types of accent, without having access to the portion of the utterance that occurs after the accented word. This proves that there are phonetic differences between the two types of accents that can help the listeners distinguish them from each other. It also became clear that raising the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented word will make the listeners perceive it as a pre-nuclear accent. Manipulating duration alone had no effect of the perception, however when accompanied by manipulations of pitch, decreasing the duration of a syllable associated with a nuclear accent, can render the word to be perceived as a pre-nuclear accented word more efficiently.

Cet article étudie l’usage prosodique et des pratiques langagières présents dans le discours politique d’un politicien de renom appartenant aux basses castes et comme haut représentant de l’Etat de Bihar en Inde. Il s’agit de Lalu Prasad Yadav (dorénavant LPY), président du parti politique Rashtriya Janta Dal, et qui a été ‘Chef ministre’ du Bihar de 1990 à 1997. Élu comme membre du parlement indien en 1977, sa présence dans la sphère politique a été caractérisée par la mise en valeur de l’usage de l’accent bihari et de pratiques langagières rurales spécifiques à la communauté de basse caste afin de construire son propre électorat. Nous proposons d’analyser certains de ses discours politiques, particulièrement des scènes médiatiques diffusées à la télévision, qui sont désormais disponible sur l’Internet. L’objectif de cette étude tend à comprendre quel sont les effets de l’utilisation d’un accent rural et son rôle dans la lutte entre classes sociales, la ‘rébellion’ des basses caste...

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By comparing two recent French films, L’Esquive (Kechiche 2004) and Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Boon 2008), a realistic drama and a comedy, this article proposes an analysis of two different cases of stylisation that entertain complex relations of authenticity with stigmatised vernaculars, and in which actors stylise their own linguistic community. Discussing cinematic perception of non-standard varieties and the way spectators read into characterisation’s techniques, it shows that awareness of any deviation from the norm is heightened by the media and taken as meaningful to the drama at play. Finally, it is argued that an ideological shift takes place during the reception of the films and that second-order indexicality is interpreted as first-order indexicality.

Everybody has an accent (Stockwell, 2003) and these can be determined by social class, geographical location and other social variables (Wells, 1982). Many previous studies have presumed that people are relatively accurate at recognising local accents, though further examination is needed in order to analyse how accurate participants are in deciding where speakers originate. Our research examined language variation and perception around the East-Midlands. There has been no regional survey of the dialects of the East Midlands since the ‘Survey of English Dialects’ in the 1950s. More recent localised studies that present an overview of regional speech in the UK either lack up-to-date research from the East Midlands or ignore the area completely. Despite this lack of empirical evidence, anecdotally it appears that speech in the East Midlands remains extremely distinctive and locals insist there is considerable variation between speech in the major urban centres of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby.

This is a survey designed to assess the effects that the self-perception of a non-native accent, when speaking a foreign language, may have on a person's willingness to communicate. In particular, this survey is designed for native Arabic-speakers who speak English as a foreign language. I welcome feedback on this survey to improve its validity. The survey has not yet been implemented; the link to it will be shared here some time in April, 2016. Note that it may not remain active past June of 2016.

This article investigates the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions in Persian. Kahnemuyipour (2003) proposes that Ezafe constructions should be treated as phonological words. The present study based on phonetic observations and phonological evidence argues that each lexical word present in an Ezafe construction forms a phonological phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme tends to phrase with its preceding material to satisfy the constraint ONSET. This paper also suggests that the prosodic status of weak function words such as the Ezafe morpheme or some conjunctions that do not belong to their preceding or following syntactic maximal projections can be best explained by adopting a new constraint, namely MAP-XP.

"""This paper investigates the prosodic structure of weak (stressless) function words in Persian within the framework of Prosodic Phonology. Weak function words in Persian are prosodic clitics that form phrases with the material following them (proclitics) or preceding them (enclitics). So far, only the prosody of enclitics has been studied in the literature. The present study proposes that, in Persian, enclitics are affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. These proposals contribute to the findings in Prosodic Phonology that prosodic categories can in fact be recursive and non-exhaustive.

Publisherʼs version downloadable at:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:657354""""

Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu; Buthke, Carolin & Meisenburg, Trudel (2013): “Caracteristicas prosodicas de l’occitan dins son context galloromanic”, in: Casanova Herrero, Emili & Calvo Rigual, Cesáreo (Eds.): Actes del 26é Congrés de Lingüística i Filologia Romàniques, València, September 6-11, 2010, Section 1, Vol. I. Berlin: W. de Gruyter.