More than a magic moment – Paving the way for dynamics of articulation and prosodic structure

Abstract

Research into human communication through the spoken language is full of dichotomies that have often stood in the way of progress in the past, notably the distinction between phonetics and phonology, and more recently, and somewhat orthogonally, between prosody and articulation. The papers collected here make considerable advances in overcoming these restrictions, providing valuable contributions towards the integration of these fields. The increasing evidence for dependencies across the different levels of linguistic structure, and the complexity of the interplay between them, has led to the application of dynamical approaches to spoken language description. With these approaches, coordination and variation within and across systems have begun to play a central role. This paper identifies a common thread through the papers in this issue, in which variation is a consequence of dynamically time-varying behavior that cannot be captured by static snapshots (magic moments).