Abstract
This paper focuses on some recent calls for a more substance-based approach to phonetic and phonological descriptions, and presents some . 2) concrete examples from Sotho to demonstrate some of the inadequacies found in traditional approaches.
Highlights
In the preface of a recent edition of one of the most well-kno,.u phonetic journals, viz. Phonetica (1981 : 5 ff.), the editor prof
This paper focuses on some recent calls for a more substance-based approach to phonetic and phonological descriptions, and presents some concrete examples from Sotho to demonstrate some of the inadequacies found in traditional approaches
Klaus Kohler repeats a previous plea for " a revival of phonetics as speech science, in which scientific method is subordinated to a language perspective rather than to a professional linguistic one, and in which experimental investigations of specific phenomena in individual languages are integrated into . a general theoretical discussion, shifting the general aspects of human speech back into the focus of our attention." He refers to a theme. of great theoretical import in modern phonetics, viz. the temporal aspects of speech production and perception, and states that while the classical segmental approach of phonology and linguistics have had very little concern for the time dimension of speech, a new approach in terms of language categories integrating the time dimension of speech has become a necessity
Summary
In the preface of a recent edition of one of the most well-kno,.u phonetic journals, viz. Phonetica (1981 : 5 ff.), the editor prof. The central, publicly observable vehicle of linguistic communication, which is au fond to be regarded as a human artifact, manufactured ad hoc to serve a definite communicative end" (Ohman 1979 : xxi) It a1ms at an unprejudiced study of the acoustic speech signal, unmediated by any preconceived theory of segmentation or whatever, in the hope that it II could give us a rather new and different understanding of language" (Ohman 1979 xx). The point to be made, is that these two sounds may sound· different, they are not different in their respective (static) qualities, but rather in their temporal realization of prosodic features It is exactly this type of dynamic prosodic information that is lost 1n the decoding of an acoustic signal into linear series of static discrete segments. A model of description integrating the time dimension of speech would most probably be able to account for this phenomenon
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