Extra Syllables Research Articles

An acoustic view of the local Thai “Lae” reading and singing

This paper explores the acoustic characteristics of the local Thai “Lae” reading, as opposed to the singing one. The so-called “Lae /laeae/” with the contents based on the local Thai culture has been the traditional Thai singing for centuries and has been enculturated only within the families of professional vocalists. In this paper, an acoustic study was conducted. Two professional Thai vocalists (one female and one male) were asked to read aloud and sing two Lae songs: the gac song (n = 236 syllables) and the song of the Mahasawat Canal (n = 272 syllables). There were a total of 2032 tokens (508 syllables X 2 speakers X 2 types). All the tokens were digitally recorded in a sound-proof room and acoustically analyzed in the Praat program. The results revealed that, in singing, the vowel duration and the final sonorants (if any) were two-three times longer; the vowels and diphthongs were lower (with higher F1); and the F0 levels for Thai tones were higher than the reading counterparts. Additionally, in vocalization, both female and male vocalists inserted extra syllables and glottalization while singing. It is hoped that this acoustic study will help glocalize and preserve the local Thai Lae singing.

'Put' Sounds #@!... But, 'But' Sounds $&!...

In English, Put sounds #@!... But, But sounds $&!... ; The sounds or pronunciations of the two words are different not just because of the difference in the first syllable; even though the writing of the two words has much in common. This is in stark contrast to Korean or Indian Languages, where nothing or (or very little) is lost between writing and reading (pronunciation) as discussed below. Sounds and Syllables: Korean and Indian Languages (Figure [fig:Korean-and-Kannada] shows the mapping between Korean and Sanskrit / Hindi and Kannada syllables) have similar pronunciation or sounds. More importantly they have identical structure in terms of having the feature of being able to combine vowels and consonants to produce a wider range of sounds. Korean has 40 basic syllables (10 11 vowels; 14 5 consonants). Indian Languages have 51 or 52 basic syllables depending on who you ask (13 2 1 vowels; 25 11 consonants). Each consonant in either of the languages can be combined with each of the vowels. In Korean this becomes 21*19 = 399 sounds. In Sanskrit or Kannada this becomes 16*36 = 576 sounds. This approach ensures that nothing (or very little) is lost between writing and reading (pronunciation) in Korean and Indian languages. The real question is whether it requires a lot more effort to remember more syllables; though the extra syllables are only a handful (14 more in Korean and 26 more in Kannada). The key innovation that simplifies learning is the combination of vowels and syllables in set patterns. Curios to know which other languages have a similar structure.

Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language by Donald S. Hair

Reviewed by: Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language by Donald S. Hair Clara Dawson (bio) Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language by Donald S. Hair; pp. 312. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2015. $70.00 cloth. As donald Hair writes in the conclusion to Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language, "the EBB I present in this book is not the usual EBB" (280), and indeed, his study of Barrett Browning's poetics gives one of the most clear-sighted explications of her exceptional and experimental poetry. Hair's book also evinces how a full scholarly edition of a poet's work can extend the scope of criticism: the publication in 2010 of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Pickering and Chatto) has made it much easier for critics to explore the full range of her works (and also to assume that this range is accessible to their readers). Hair makes excellent use of this advantage, covering her career from its inception in An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems (1826) to its culmination in Last Poems (1862), and includes various unpublished pieces. The introduction gives a useful précis of the critical field and particularly of the growth in scholarly interest in Victorian prosody. Taking his title from one of Robert Browning's courtship letters, Hair follows this prosodic interest in the direction of music, which he defines as "music in its technical sense, that is, as units of equal time (bars), each beginning with a strong beat" (3). He argues that Barrett Browning resists the eighteenth-century emphasis on conventional scansion and syllable counting, developing instead a poetical [End Page 191] system that consists of units of equal time, including pauses, caesuras, and extra syllables rather than feet. Hair's book builds on the critical work done by Jason Rudy, Joseph Phelan, and Meredith Martin on Victorian prosody, but particularly on the case made by these critics that prosody is not a passive reflection of themes. Instead, prosody is seminal in the invention of new ways to sound political as well as theological ideas and debates. Each of the readings in Hair's book is interwoven with material from contemporary discussions of poetics and from Barrett Browning's published reviews and letters, revealing her debates with correspondents such as Uvedale Price, Richard Hengist Horne, and, of course, Robert Browning. This thorough research is rewarding in that it exhibits Barrett Browning's experiments as deeply thought-through and self-conscious processes. For instance, chapter 4's focus on Barrett Browning's delineation of English literary history in the Athenaeum and her translation of Chaucer in the 1840s enables Hair to elucidate further the development of her poetics toward quantity rather than accent. While each section of Hair's book offers an illuminating reading, most valuable are the chapters on works that have received relatively little criticism, such as the early poetry and An Essay on Mind. In chapter 1, Hair lays the groundwork for his theory of Barrett Browning's musical poetics by giving an account of her engagement with philosophers of mind and language, particularly Locke and Bacon, in An Essay on Mind. He establishes the philosophical grounding of her poetics and the relations they create between words and ideas, matter and mind, demonstrating that "the main point of her definition of poetry is that it is a making and not an imitating" (37). In chapter 2, Hair explores the context of key words such as "harmony" (18) and "cadence" (19) within the history of prosodic debates about quantity and duration in English and classical verse and examines their manifestation in Barrett Browning's early poetry. These two chapters set up one of the central arguments of the book: that Barrett Browning's poetics propose an idea of world harmony wherein music links the earthly and spiritual spheres and, if enabled through poetry, brings insight and truth to readers. Readings of "The Seraphim" and "Drama of Exile" show how EBB's religious beliefs intertwined with her poetics; in what Hair calls a "myth of musical prosody" (105), she recreates the cadences and resonances of divine language using the fallen language of...

Phonological and morphophonological effects on grammatical development in children with specific language impairment.

Five-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI) often struggle with mastering grammatical morphemes. It has been proposed that verbal morphology is particularly problematic in this respect. Previous research has also shown that in young typically developing children grammatical markers appear later in more phonologically challenging contexts. The main aim was to explore whether grammatical deficits in children with SLI are morphosyntactic in nature, or whether phonological factors also explain some of the variability in morpheme production. The analysis considered the effects of the same phonological factors on the production of three different morphemes: two verbal (past tense -ed; third-person singular -s) and one nominal morpheme (possessive -s). The participants were 30 children with SLI (21 boys) aged 4;6-5;11 years (mean = 5;1). The data were collected during grammar test sessions, which consisted of question/answer elicitations of target forms involving picture props. A total of 2301 items were analysed using binary logistic regression; the predictors included: (1) utterance position of the target word, (2) phonological complexity of its coda, (3) voicing of the final stem consonant, (4) syllabicity (allomorph type) and (5) participant accounting for the individual differences in the responses. The results showed a robust effect of syllabicity on the correct morpheme production. Specifically, syllabic allomorphs (e.g., She dresses) were significantly more challenging than the segmental ones (e.g., He runs) for all three morphemes. The effects of other factors were observed only for a single morpheme: coda complexity and voicing helped explain variability in past tense production, and utterance position significantly affected children's performance with the possessive. The participant factor also had a significant effect, indicating high within-group variability--often observed in SLI population. The systematic effect of syllabicity across both verbal and nominal morphemes suggests morphophonological influences in the grammatical development of children with SLI that cannot be fully explained by syntactic deficits. Poorer performance in producing syllabic allomorphs can be accounted for by much lower overall frequency of these forms, and by the 'tongue-twisting' effect of producing similar segments in succession, as in added [aedəd], washes [wɒʃəz]. Interestingly, the greater acoustic salience of the syllabic allomorphs (an extra syllable) does not enhance children's abilities to produce them. These findings suggest that the interconnections between different levels of language have a stronger effect on the grammatical development of children with SLI than might be expected. Allomorphy should, therefore, be taken into account when designing language assessments and speech therapy, ensuring that children receive sufficient practice with the entire set of allomorphic variants.

English Iambic Verse: The Syllable

Syllable length plays an important if subtle role in the sound of English iambs. In 1909, Robert Bridges, who cared deeply about such matters, complained: Indifference is the strangest phenomenon in English verse. Our language contains as long as can be, and others short as can be, and yet the two extremes are very commonly treated as rhythmically equivalent. A sort of of stress is set up, and MISPRONUNCIATION IS RELIED ON overcome any 'false quantities.' ... There is little doubt [a] Prosody [would] pay great attention the quantitative value of syllables (Letter 67). Bridges was thinking of the lyric poems of Swinburne, whose inescapable beat certainly imposed a rhythmical patter on the words. But this quantity also affected iambic pentameter. An accented syllable may be short, an unaccented syllable long, and it doesn't matter, so long as the beat is strong enough suppress these differences. Bridges himself spent years pursuing a perfected prosody based on syllable duration, producing some two thousand lines of quantitative hexameter verse before he abandoned as a basis for English poetry. If the attempt failed, it is because, as Charles 0. Hartman has said, quantities are not sufficiently defined in English provide the basis for a meter (34). The differences between longer and shorter are simply too slight. Even so, poets with good ears (like Bridges) are keenly aware of syllable length. Here are some iambic lines by Keats and Tennyson. In them, receive a metrical stress are almost always long. (Throughout this paper, / and x indicate accented and unaccented syllables, while--and [??] indicate long and short ones.) (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Keats arid Tennyson pay attention how their long and short are distributed. Stressed are generally long, and when a stressed syllable is short, the poet compensates for the loss of duration in the stressed position by lengthening elsewhere maintain rhythmic consistency. For example, the short stressed syllable may be followed by a long unstressed one. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Here the stressed syllable puck-, is short, and the unstressed sequence which follows it, -ered f-, is a long one--including three consoriatits--to make up for its shortness. Similarly, in [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Or the short stressed syllable may be followed by a pause: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the last example, the normal word order, pipe ditties (transitive verb--object.) is interrupted by the prepositional phrase to the spirit; the pause necessitated by this slightly awkward syntax is reinforced by the t:d juncture. Shod stressed are most common in the fifth position, where the line, break acts as a pause: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The comparative indifference u) syllabic at the end of the line has its analogue in the classical hexameter, the last syllable of winch can be either long or short. Brevity in a stressed syllable may also be redressed by adding an extra syllable after the stress. The result is analogous the resolved iamb of Greek and Latin, in which a long syllable is replaced by two short ones. (2) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Or consider the following sequence: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Eleven of the fifteen stressed are long, and anapestic feel (or so-called elisions) occur immediately after three of the four are defective, i.e., short. In the fourth instance, the slowdown after the short stressed that is delayed by an intervening foot (Ely-), but makes an appearance nonetheless: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The extra syllable can even precede the stress. …

Perception-based vowel insertion by native Spanish-speaking learners of English

A hypothesis is proposed which claims that vowel prosthesis before word-initial [sC] clusters by L1 Spanish learners of English is a perception-based repair phenomenon conditioned by L1 biases for native patterns of intergestural timing in complex onsets. Data from a series of off-line perception tests involving fifty L1 Spanish-speaking children confirm the erroneous perception of an extra syllable in a majority of nonce tokens containing the target stimuli. Results of a set of follow-up discrimination and identification tasks prove that Spanish-speakers access information derived from native timing patterns in order to map continuous speech streams to categorical units before lexical storage occurs, supporting the viability of a bias derived from native timing configurations. The findings are of interest since they bear directly on contemporary research in the acquisition of L1 phasing relations and their effects on L2 phonological acquisition.

The Book of the Rotten Daughter (review)

Reviewed by: The Book of the Rotten Daughter Marilyn Kallet (bio) Alice Friman. The Book of the Rotten Daughter. BkMk Press. Alice Friman’s latest work offers an impeccably crafted example of the best of contemporary poetry in its fiercest guise. There’s not an extra syllable in the collection. Strong emotion is captured in taut lines, unaffected diction, textured sounds. Speaking of her mother, Friman observes: “All her life / she was ammunition / in a girdle” (“Osteoporosis”). This is Friman’s way of phrasing Keats’s “Beauty is truth / truth beauty” —her unorthodox way of talking about poetry’s capacity to shape anger, to wrap the truths of art in images that are witty, domestic, and intimate. It’s no accident that the poet’s mother becomes “paper”—the place where poetry lives: “What secret / thinned to a fault line in the bone / betrays her now? / Crumple of paper lost in a bed.” This is a more humble version of Yeats’s “hammered gold,” expressed from a woman’s perspective, with empathy, dignity, and sorrow. Through “thinning” away of excess, through the alchemy of poetry, Friman’s aging mother is translated into art. Some of the poetry makes the reader laugh out loud, as in “The Talent Show,” which reports on a nursing home event; the reader cheers the riotous slapstick until she is grabbed by the undertow of sadness: “And [End Page 171] everyone unwrapped their own wooden spoon / except Armine Bonner, 116B, / who’d not let go of her dolly for anything.” In the lyrical tercets of “The Fall,” Friman charts her mother’s fall in a sustained metaphor: The carpet tilted like the sea. And she who never walked on water tipped, spun, then toppled— a bundle of sticks. Pinocchio’s old mother come apart in her strings. The imagery grows wilder as the emotion deepens: The way I watched you’d think it was Channel 8, another trick at the Olympics— another triple lutz gone wrong . . . Friman’s work often embodies the aesthetics of the grotesque; if anything, she favors truth more than harmony. Her dry wit lets her approach mortality with a kind of detachment that enables the reader to enjoy the poems while taking stock of mortal troubles. “Dressing the Skeleton” avoids sentimentality about the poet’s mother by taking the clinical view: If your specimen isn’t the medical school variety— suspended from a hook or neck-locked in a standing position—you’ll find placing it seated in a padded chair works best. The “it” here depersonalizes the subject, turns mother into object; the readers, like medical students, may seem to observe dispassionately in an effort to grasp the toll of aging and illness. In the last stanza, the poet turns “it” into “mine”: With mine, I like to finish with a touch of moisturizing lipstick before I brush out the hair, still lush and growing as if it didn’t know the mind had blown its case and it was time to stop. Friman reports clearly on physical demise and the ravages of aging, but against the odds she offers consolation—not immortality or religion, but love, and the repair work of music and image. In “Final Instructions,” Friman articulates her own burial rites: “When I die I want to be buried / with sweet potatoes candied or / sauteed with apples & cinnamon . . .” The poem is built in a column with no punctuation, no pauses, and no final conclusion at the end. The poet’s yearning for reconnection with her [End Page 172] mother has staying power and resonance, quieter than Ginsberg’s Howl, but no less fierce. The poems in this collection cover many topics but center on the poet’s aging mother and on the death of her difficult father. Yet the love poems and poems about nature are resonant, and the poem in memory of Denise Levertov is a treasure, with line after line of discovery and elation: “all her poems come swooping down / in one last fall and gift . . ” Words are “humming together in a sleeve of air.” Alice Friman’s poetry sets a standard in its uncompromising look at aging and mortality, its rhythmical insistence and tightness—its...

영어 2음절 차용어의 음절수 예측 알고리즘

When English disyllabic words are borrowed into the Korean language, the loanwords tend to have extra syllables. The purpose of this paper is to find the syllable increase conditions in loanword adaptation and further to provide an algorithm to predict the syllable numbers of English disyllabic loanwords. There are three syllable augmentation conditions. The presence of diphthongs and the existence of consonant clusters guarantee the increase of the syllable numbers in the English loanwords. Further, the quality of the final consonant (and the preceding vowel) sometimes trigger the increase of the syllable numbers. Based on the conditions, an algorithm composed of 4 rules are proposed in order to predict the number of syllables in English disyllabic loanwords.

DEMEANING THE DEMENTED: IS “POLITICALLY CORRECT” GETTING OLD?

To the Editor: In our daily practice as physicians, we may feel our language uncomfortably challenged by a growing vocabulary of phrases and turns of speech that initially strike us as the mere fashion of political correctness. Geriatricians, on the whole, can hardly be accused of not having hitched at least a short ride on the politically correct bandwagon. The other day, a geriatrician colleague gently admonished me for referring to an elderly couple as “cute.” Similarly, geriatricians increasingly recognized it is as “ageist” to refer to an elderly patient as “adorable” or any similar such term. Many view this as an unwelcome intrusion of political correctness into our speech and an increasing burden of overpoliteness layered upon our communication with and about our patients. Nevertheless, the rejection of these terms by geriatricians reflects a growing awareness of the subtle and often undesired ways that such terms can influence our relationships with those we care for. Yet, despite this increasing awareness, the geriatric community continues to find acceptable what I find an even more problematic term: the term “demented” to describe patients with various forms of dementia, an acceptance reflected by the use of the word in several prior issues of this Journal.1,2 The term “demented” derives from the Latin “de,” to undo, plus “mens,” meaning mind. Thus, to say that a person has dementia is to say that she or he has a disease process that “undoes the mind,” whereas to say that a person is “demented” is tantamount to saying that he or she no longer has a mind. And although I may well be among the last to espouse the unquestionably more politically correct term “sanitation engineer” in lieu of “garbage collector,” I would wish to be among the first to publicly denounce the deeply entrenched, but no less politically incorrect, term “demented.” The problem with the term “demented” lies even beyond its etymologic roots. Despite the intentions of the speaker, the term “demented,” whether used as noun or as adjective, can subtly contribute to dehumanizing patient–doctor relationships with older people and their families; to say that so-and-so is “demented,” or to speak of “the demented” in general, has the subtle linguistic effect of shifting significance from a condition that the patient possesses to an unwitting reduction of the patient to little more than the debilitated state itself in which the condition has left her or him. Although some may argue that that is precisely the point of the word—to emphasize that there is no humanity left, only the physical remnants of it—such a position could only be defended, if at all, in patients with the most severe, end-stage dementia. It is one of our most sacred duties as physicians, in caring for those with dementia in particular, not only to recognize their humanity, but also to acknowledge and celebrate it in the way that we communicate with others. And as for what word to offer as an acceptable replacement for the pithy term in question so firmly ensconced in our medical parlance, how about the more mannerly, if somewhat less terse “cognitively disenfranchised” or the more descriptive, if perhaps formulaic “cholinergically challenged”? Perhaps, however, we would do well to abandon altogether the goal of finding a suitable word to replace the term in much the way clinical speech is increasingly giving up the terms “schizophrenic” and “alcoholic” in favor of “man with schizophrenia” and “woman with alcoholism.” Although whatever epithet we end up choosing will invariably roll off the tongue with considerably less ease than “demented,” patients' families, friends, and perhaps even many of our “patients with dementia” themselves will no doubt appreciate the effort invested in those few extra syllables. The author wishes to acknowledge Michael May and Dr. Gabriel Brandeis for critical reading of the manuscript. Financial Disclosure: None. Author Contributions: Dr. Weissmann was responsible for writing the entire letter. Sponsor's Role: None.

Hermetic Memory: An Exchange on Dickinson Between Two Poets

Hermetic Memory: An Exchange on Dickinson Between Two Poets Brenda Hillman Katie Peterson Abstract Poets Brenda Hillman and Katie Peterson write about two Dickinson poems, “A Cloud withdrew from the Sky” and “After a hundred years,” in a collaborative, epistolary essay. In March, 2006, we began to email each other about a few of ED's poems. We had met after a conference, and thought of the project as an alternative to a more academic approach to Dickinson, at a time when we were both very busy. We decided to exchange "loose paragraphs" for a few weeks, beginning with the following poem: A Cloud withdrew from the Sky Superior Glory be But that Cloud and it's Auxiliaries Are forever lost to me Had I but further scanned Had I secured the Glow In an Hermetic Memory It had availed me now - Never to pass the Angel With a glance and a Bow Till I am firm in Heaven Is my intention, now - (Fr1077) B: Just the bafflement about the first stanza: "withdrew" is so forceful, clinching the "personification" that Dickinson's noun-caps often set up. To withdraw, the Cloud has to have willed itself to be in that context in the first place, and of [End Page 47] course, her universe is inhabited in that way. It seems Blakean (the Clod talking to the Worm, etc.) the way her Cloud has not only a will, a procedure, but also a shared will (its Auxiliaries). Does it withdraw so it can be Superior Glory? Punctuation—lack thereof—makes that hard to determine; I'm struck especially that the familiar breath-emphasis-dash (her half-horizon) is missing completely from the first stanza. The poem is written in the period of her greatest production, yet has the elegiac tone not of the intensity of terror or degrees of pain, but that those things are on the way out. Some of the promise that accompanies the fear during the time of her immense energetic output has also been withdrawn, though the sense of purpose remains; she writes to Higginson: "The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can—" [L265]) The meter the first stanza sets up—cobbling iambs, trochees and a breathless gallop of anapests, as if she were running in her slippers—puts stresses in unexpected places (Glow gets a stress). What do you think about the first stanza? K: There are a number of poems where Dickinson sees a splitting in the sky in the years before this poem was written: "I saw no Way - The Heavens were stitched - " (Fr633), for example, that surreal sci-fi vision of touching the hem of the universe. But this is different; she's not just at the mercy of a world but implicating her own ability to see and save and savor and know. This first stanza wears its loss lightly, just as you say, as if the danger is passed. The placement of "Superior Glory be" in the second line, after the departure, stopped me in my tracks because the glory should be that the cloud exists, right? Not that it's withdrawn? But of course both are true: the second line enacts the way she realizes the glory of the thing only as it disappears and the Glory of the poem is the disappearance itself. Also, there's contagious loss here, the multiplication of loss, though there's almost a pleasure in it. I remember something that Elaine Scarry wrote about beauty wanting to make copies of itself. As soon as Dickinson's "I" realizes the cloud has departed she misses not only it but its "Auxiliaries," perhaps copying that beauty across the sky in memory in order to preserve it in greater copiousness? The extra syllable in "forever" reminds me how different a kind of time an "ever" of any kind is compared to the amount of time a cloud takes to withdraw from a sky. I'm...

Final lowering: Fact, artifact or dialectal variation?

The existence of final lowering has been disputed by Grabe (1998), who suggested that Liberman and Pierrehumbert’s 1984 finding was due to declination, as there was an extra syllable, ‘‘and,’’ between the last two accents in their materials (e.g. ‘‘RASPberries, MULberries and BRAMBLEberries’’). Arvaniti and Godjevac (2003), however, replicated the results of L&P with and without the extra syllable (c.f. ‘‘LIma beans, NAvy beans and SOY beans’’ vs. ‘‘LIma beans, GREEN beans and SOY beans’’). Here, the materials used in A&G were elicited from speakers of Standard British English (SBE). The results confirmed that the disagreement between L&P and Grabe is due to dialect: the SBE speakers did not exhibit final lowering under either condition. They showed less steep F0 slopes, so all accents after the first had similar scaling, while the last accent showed a rise (rather than a fall, as in American English), enhancing the lack of final lowering. These differences show that final lowering is better seen as a phonological device that a linguistic variety may employ in a given melody. Also, the cross-varietal comparison supports the view that F0 downtrends consist of distinct components (declination, final lowering), each of which may be utilized independently of the others.

'The Bridegroom', with 'Count Nulin', and 'The Tale of the Golden Cockerel' by Alexander s> Pushkin Antony Wood (review)

714 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 detailed description of the manuscriptwhich forms the basis of this edition, the Vilna manuscript or, with much else, e.g. various books of the Bible and the chronicles of George Hamartolus and John Matalas, the 'Vilna Chronograph ', is given. We have a biography of Josephus Flavius, a comparison of the Slavonic translationwith the Greek original, and an exploration of issues concerningthelanguageof the original.Attentionthenfocuseson the Slavonic manuscript:evidence for Greek influence (Graecisms,calques), the style and linguisticcharacterof the Slavonictranslation(includingan enormousamount of data).Fromhere we move to considerthe time and place of the translation, bearingin mind archaisms(muchin evidence in spiteof the constantupdating of the original by the many copyists and editors through whose hands the manuscriptpassed).The case is alsomade forseeing the translationas a signal achievement of the 'Old Russian' language (it was made in Kievan Rus' no laterthan the eleventh century)and detailed referenceis made to the Hebrew ]osippon.Finally, evidence for the popularity of the work among generations of Russianreadersplaces it firmlyin the centre of Russiansocietyand culture. Bearing in mind that one of the editors, H. Leeming, was unwell at important times during the completion of the task, the entire text has been edited with admirablecare and is presentedin a way pleasing to the eye; only trivial misprintshave been noted, e.g. 'Mes_erskij'(p. xiii), and there are a few minor corrigendaand omissions. This is an immense contribution to scholarshipfor all students of Russian history,philology (in the European sense), and literature;it is the best type of edition, an unassuming one, which makes the text and much accompanying material available, exercising minimum judgement and applying judicious and expert selection the editors and those who helped them deserve our thanks. University ofStAndrews J. IAN PRESS Pushkin, Alexander. 'TheBridegroom', with 'Count Julin', and 'TheTaleof the Golden Cockerel'. Translatedwith an afterwordby Antony Wood. Angel Books,London, 2002. 6i pp. Illustrations.Notes. fI4.95; ?7.95. IF translatingverse is difficult,translatingPushkin'sverse is doubly so. Some translatorshalve the problemby ignoringthe rhymes,a stratagemakinto that of a footballerwho ignores the colour of his opponents' shirts.Antony Wood is not such a translator. His versions of these three poems follow both the metricalpatternand the rhyme scheme of the originals.Only in one area does he depart from the original:the alternation of 'masculine' (i.e. stressed)and 'feminine'(i.e. unstressed)rhymes.Anyone who has ever triedto emulate this major feature of Russian verse will find themselves with a surfeit of words ending in '-ing'. Rhyme is, as Wood points out, much easier in Russian than in English, and Pushkin is quite happy to rhyme past tenses and adjectival endings. Thus, in the opening stanza of TheBridegroom we find the rhyme propadala/vbezhala, rendered by Wood as disappeared/reappeared. In the seventh stanza Pushkin's'I perstni zolotye/I plat'ia parchevye' becomes 'Gold rings and necklaces/And rich-brocadeddresses'(p. iI), where the rhyme does not REVIEWS 7I5 work, a fact exacerbated by the extra syllable in the second line. Generally, however, Wood's rhymes are much more successful and, at their best, recapture Pushkin'sfluent lightness. Thus, in Count Nulin,we read how the latter-dayTarquin'Once more setsforthto seekLucretia/Resolved to hazard all to reach her' (p. 28). The three poems offered here a very different. 7he Bridegroom, Pushkin's contribution to Gothic verse, borrows both the metre and rhyme scheme of Burger'sLenore. Count Nulin,a witty parody of Shakespeare'sRapeofLucrece is in iambic tetrametre,while the pseudo-fairytaleTheTaleoftheGolden Cockerel is in trochaictetrametre.In each case Woodfollowsthe originalwith some style. Like all translators, Wood has to sacrifice something. Unlike some translators, however, he is clearly aware exactly what he is sacrificing. It behoves anyreviewerwho feelshe sacrificestoo muchto suggestimprovements and to takenote of Wood'sbriefbut usefulafterword.Here he regretsthat the rise in translation theory has not been matched by a rise in the quantity of good Pushkin translations. Only exponents of translation theory will be surprisedby this. Maidenhead D. M. PURSGLOVE Andrew,J. and Reid, R. (eds). TwoHundred Years ofPushkin. Studies in Slavic Literatureand Poetics,vols 37 and 39. EditionsRodopi, Amsterdamand New York, 2003. Volume i.- 'Pushkin's Secret'. RussianWriters ReadandReReadPushkin .xi + 213 pp...

Two Hundred Years of Pushkin by J. Andrew R. Reid (review)

REVIEWS 7I5 work, a fact exacerbated by the extra syllable in the second line. Generally, however, Wood's rhymes are much more successful and, at their best, recapture Pushkin'sfluent lightness. Thus, in Count Nulin,we read how the latter-dayTarquin'Once more setsforthto seekLucretia/Resolved to hazard all to reach her' (p. 28). The three poems offered here a very different. 7he Bridegroom, Pushkin's contribution to Gothic verse, borrows both the metre and rhyme scheme of Burger'sLenore. Count Nulin,a witty parody of Shakespeare'sRapeofLucrece is in iambic tetrametre,while the pseudo-fairytaleTheTaleoftheGolden Cockerel is in trochaictetrametre.In each case Woodfollowsthe originalwith some style. Like all translators, Wood has to sacrifice something. Unlike some translators, however, he is clearly aware exactly what he is sacrificing. It behoves anyreviewerwho feelshe sacrificestoo muchto suggestimprovements and to takenote of Wood'sbriefbut usefulafterword.Here he regretsthat the rise in translation theory has not been matched by a rise in the quantity of good Pushkin translations. Only exponents of translation theory will be surprisedby this. Maidenhead D. M. PURSGLOVE Andrew,J. and Reid, R. (eds). TwoHundred Years ofPushkin. Studies in Slavic Literatureand Poetics,vols 37 and 39. EditionsRodopi, Amsterdamand New York, 2003. Volume i.- 'Pushkin's Secret'. RussianWriters ReadandReReadPushkin .xi + 213 pp. Notes. Index. ?45.00: $54.00 (paperback); Volume 2.- Alexander Pushkin: MythandMonument. x + 2 I I pp. Notes. Index. ?45.00: $54.00 (paperback). To be an editor of the proceedings of any academic conference must be no easy task. On the arts side at any rate, contributors, eager for publications with which to keep the Research Assessmentwolf at bay, may, while sticking to a general overarching theme, stray into all sorts of areas only loosely connected with the ostensible theme of the conference. Joe Andrew and Robert Reid are two of the most experienced editors in the Slavonic field: separatevolumes of Keele University'slong-standingjournal EssaysinPoetics have produced coherent and usefulrecordsof conferencesdevoted to, among others,AndreiPlatonov and Nikolai Gogol'. Now they have producedin book form an edited version of papers given at the conference held in Oxford in I999 to markthe 200th anniversaryof Pushkin'sbirth. Joe Andrew introduces the twelve contributions which make up the first volume, and himself contributes a fascinatingpiece on Pushkinianechoes in works by Dostoevskii, Elena Gan, V. F. Odoevskii and Maria Zhukova. His co-editor introduces the second volume and rounds off the eleven contributions with a perceptive application of the ideas of the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey to TheBronze Horseman, MozartandSalieri,TheQueen ofSpades and other worksin which the theme of time is clearly dominant. In their introductions the co-editors achieve the not inconsiderablefeat of avoiding mere anticipatory rehash. 7I6 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 Although the individual contributions are referred to as 'chapters', even skilfuleditors cannot entirelymasktheir conference paper origins. Inevitably the contributionsvary somewhat in presentation and length, and also in the amount of technicalvocabularythey use. Readerswho are averseto thisneed have no fear. It is kept to a minimum and where it is used, notably in Sander Brouwer'sstudyof text elements in Eugene Onegin, forwhich he coins the terms 'motifeme' and 'mythologeme', and in Andre van Holk's study of the salient features of Don-Juanism (with particular reference to The StoneGuest),it enhances ratherthan detractsfrom the argument.A second chapter devoted to TheStoneGuest,by Robin Aizlewood, tackles the theme of doubling and makes useful comparisonswith TheQueen ofSpades. Of the longer chaptersin the first volume, that by Valentina Polukhina on Pushkin and Brodskii is outstanding, although some might quibble with her use of some Pushkin juveniliato make comparisons with Brodskii'sview of the world. However, Brodskiiwas almost as precocious as Pushkinand, at the age of eighteen, was jokingly dubbed 'the Jewish Pushkin'. This notion finds a curious echo in Diana Burgin's contribution 'Tsvetaeva's Three Pushkins' in which an obscure i 899 articleclaimingthatPushkinwas aJew seemsto have influenced Tsvetaeva's thinking on Pushkin and stimulated her fascination with his 'ethnic otherness'. As Henrietta Mondry points out, an analogous theme surfacesin Rozanov, who discerned in Pushkina theme he termed ' theJew and Pushkin'.Equallyoutstanding,from the second volume, are the chapters written by Tatiana Smoliarova, Alexandra Smith and Michael Basker. Perhaps their common subject manner inspired them...

On the origins and scope on final lowering

This experiment examines final lowering, the lower than expected scaling of the last pitch accent in downstepping word lists. In word lists of four or five items two parameters were manipulated. First the number of unaccented syllables between accents was either constantly two (‘‘LIma beans, GREEN beans and SOY beans’’); alternatively, the presence of ‘‘and’’ resulted in an extra syllable between the penultimate and final accent (‘‘LIma beans, NAvy beans and SOY beans’’). Second, the number of unaccented syllables after the final accent was either one (‘‘SOY beans’’) or three (‘‘HAricot beans’’). The results showed evidence of final lowering, in that the final accent in four word lists was lower than the fourth accent in five word lists, but the presence of ‘‘and’’ did not produce extra lowering of the final peak, suggesting that final lowering is an independent phenomenon, not an epiphenomenon of declination (contra-Grabe). On the other hand, the final accent was scaled higher when the number of unaccented syllables following it was larger. This suggests that final lowering is not under phonological control but a physiological phenomenon, since it does not target the last accent but a fixed time interval before the end of the utterance.

The music of American folk song and selected other writings on American folk music

Part 1 A note on transcription: the singer and the song phonographic recording of the song transcription of the song from phonographic recording the reader and the song music notation as a bridge three basic types of transcription illustrated song-norm majority usage underlimits of amount of detail shown in notation, especially with regard to the simpler singing styles the mode tune as representative of the song as a whole the initial tune as model tune the composite tune the transcriber and a changing oral tradition. Part 2 Notes on the songs and on manners of singing: adherence to a dynamic level throughout the song as a whole adherence to a dramatic level throughout the song as a whole adherence to the tempo set at the beginning of the song strict time and free singing styles pulse and count anticipation and delay of beat simple and compound meter metrical irregularities - prolongation and contraction of measure metrical irregularities - divisions of beat and measure rest phrase pattern interstanzaic variation manners of accommodating extra syllables of succeeding stanzas tone attack and release intonation scale and mode accompaniment appendices.

International English Usage (review)

260Reviews International English Usage. Loreto Todd and Ian Hancock. Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986. 520 pp. £16.95. Essentially this book is a combined handbook of acceptable English usage, gazetteer of English varieties around the world, and glossary of linguistic terms used in describing English. Even in the first function it will be useful to all but the most practised native writer of the language as well as to the advanced learner. One of the most interesting things that I learned was the extent to which my (British) usage has been permeated by US influences (which have often presented themselves simply as more modern). I will never say speciality for specialism again. However, the last thing Todd and Hancock would want to do is to turn this or any other reader into a language purist. There is a kind of sub-plot running through the whole book, a struggle between giving authoritative advice and avoiding the guise of the prescriptivist . Typical headwords are -ed forms, food and drink (listing differences between UK and US usage), hopefully, Ghanaian English, rankshifting, speech in literature. There is a concentration on syntax, morphology, phonology, and lexis, both in the range of entries and in the description of varieties of English. Stylistics and semantics are given some coverage, but sociolinguistics, historical philology and pragmatics (not listed) receive little attention, and their terminology is scantily covered. Consistent with this is the treatment of discourse analysis as the study of cohesion above the level of the sentence, with no mention of speech act theory. The terminology of classical rhetoric is given in some detail, presumably in response to its continued use in some teaching traditions. Particularly good are the entries on the presentation of written work, and there are some very clear and concise accounts of aspects of (Standard) English syntax and morphology. There are plenty of examples, and in only a very few cases (e.g. ergative) do they fail to illustrate how a term is used in context. The entries dealing with stylistic issues are rather weaker. The term (extra) stress is misused in relation to metrics (9, 173), where what is meant is that there is an extra syllable. For alliteration, the reason that the term is sometimes Reviews261 applied to vowels is that in a verse form where alliteration is compulsory, vowels count as zero consonants, and all alliterate with each other (and IM). The entry on emphasis equates it with foregrounding, but neither takes account of the stylistic distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic foregrounding, leaving it unclear how a pattern (such as alliteration) can produce emphasis. The sub-categories of rhyme (feminine, masculine, end, internal, eye, etc.) are not mutually exclusive. The item on Newspeak is likewise weak— the comparison of Newspeak simplifications with those of pidgins and creóles is a red herring, but because the authors are partisans of the latter, they find themselves somehow defending the former. The term euphemism is used for evasion of tabu terms whether the new term is less or more offensive. In a book of this kind a great deal of information and instruction is packed into a small space, and different readers will object to the necessary simplifications and generalizations according to their own priorities. My own specialism is Scots, and I hope I am right in saying that this entry (Scottish English), which is badly inaccurate, is an aberration in a book which may over-simplify, but is not generally beset by inaccuracy. The quotation from MacDiarmid is from "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" not "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi." Scots is not "the only English dialect with its own standardised orthographic conventions," because its spelling is not standardized, although there is a style sheet which a few writers adhere to. It is a great cliché of the history of Scots that the lack of a translation of the Bible was crucial in its loss of status after the sixteenth century, yet we read here that "It had ... its own translation of the Bible." The confusion has arisen from the choice of Nisbet's translation of 1520 to illustrate Older Scots (the term is not given). But this translation, of the New...

The Musical Quality of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village

The Musical Quality of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village

Creative Process in Cantonese Opera III: The Role of Padding Syllables

The text of bong wong, or aria types, in Cantonese opera has to observe prescribed verse structures. In an actual performance, however, the singer very often sings a greater number of syllables in a line than are prescribed. The extra syllables are called ch'en tzu, or padding syllables,1 and may be either written into the script by the scriptwriter, or added extemporaneously on stage by the singer. This paper2 studies the role of padding syllables in the creative process of Cantonese opera. More specifically, it focuses on the following questions:

Automatic segmentation of speech into syllabic units.

As a first step toward automatic phonetic analysis of speech, one desires to segment the signal into syllable-sized units. Experiments were conducted in automatic segmentation techniques for continuous, reading-rate speech to derive such units. A new segmentation algorithm is described that allows assessment of the significance of a loudness minimum to be a potential syllabic boundary from the difference between the convex hull of the loudness function and the loudness function itself. Tested on roughly 400 syllables of continuous text, the algorithm results in 6.9% syllables missed and 2.6% extra syllables relative to a nominal, slow-speech syllable count. It is suggested that inclusion of alternative fluent-form syllabifications for multisyllabic words and the use of phonological rules for predicting syllabic contractions can further improve agreement between predicted and experimental syllable counts. Subject Classification: 70.40, 70.60.

Supplementary Syllables in Anglo-Irish Folk Singing

Frequent use of supplementary syllables distinguishes the singing from the speech of many Irish folk singers. These syllables are formed in the meaningful text by recourse to various procedures which have their basis in the spoken language; but the lengthening of speech in song greatly enlarges their scope. It is true that the extra syllables are weakly stressed ones; nevertheless, their number can be so great that their presence becomes quite obtrusive. They obtruded forcefully on the ear of an Anglo-Irish poet of the nineteenth century, William Allingham, as he listened to a fair-day ballad-seller singing a long Anglo-Irish song; and he took the opportunity to amuse his Victorian public by printing one of its stanzas in mock phonetic spelling: This pay-air discoo-ooeyoor-cèrced with sich foo-oocy-oorce o’ ray-ayizin,Ther may-aynin they ay-apee-ayx-esprayss'd so-hoo-o-o clearrrr,That fau-hor to lae—ssen too-oo ther caw-aw-he-on-vairsay-ay-ashin,My ehe-ee-in-clinay-aheeay-ashin was for too-oo-hoo-hoodraw-aw-haw-ee-aw-a-neerrrrr.after which he gave the orthographical text as follows: This pair discoursed with such force of raysoning,Their meaning they expressed so clear,That for to listen to their conversation,My inclination was for to draw near