Reviewed by: Histoire de la description de la parole: de l'introspection à l'instrumentation éd. par Christelle Dodane, et Claudia Schweitzer Wladyslaw Cichocki Dodane, Christelle, et Claudia Schweitzer, éd. Histoire de la description de la parole: de l'introspection à l'instrumentation. Champion, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7453-5595-9. Pp. 404. This collection of eleven papers (plus a preface and an afterword) deals with aspects of the historical development—from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries—of the description of speech as found in research on French. The main theme is that the notations and analytical techniques currently used in phonetic research were developed over a long period of time. Before the nineteenth century, knowledge about speech was limited to what could be perceived by auditory perception, physical observation, or intuition. However, major developments in speech research were to take place in the late nineteenth century with the invention of analytical instruments such as the kymograph, palatographic mirrors, and magnetic recordings. This theme is developed in each of the three sections of the book. The first section discusses the description of prosody. While sixteenth-century grammarians considered prosody to be an important part of rhetorical art, they tended to avoid it in their research because they had difficulty describing it. The discovery of instruments that brought into focus the acoustic features of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration helped in the creation of notational systems that were sensitive to the organization of rhythm and intonation. The second section of the book presents the development of transcription systems for segmental sounds. Research began with two types of systems, "organic" notations based on physiological articulation and writing systems that were close to the Latin alphabet; these would eventually lead to the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The third section of papers outlines the growth of experimental phonetics laboratories in Paris, Grenoble, Montpellier, and Strasbourg. It establishes connections between this development and research on déclamation, gesture, and singing. Among the topics covered are the legacies of Abbé Jean-Pierre Rousselot, the phonetician and dialectologist who was the founder of experimental phonetics, and Maurice Grammont, whose research on phonetic variation was a precursor to the field of sociophonetics. Many of the nineteen specialists who contributed papers to this volume are associated with the Praxiling Laboratoire de linguistique at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, and they represent different fields: phonetics, phonology, speech pathology, musicology, history of linguistics, and traditional grammar. This diversity may account for some of the differences in writing style and for the loose cohesion between chapters. A noticeable shortcoming is the small number of illustrations in the chapters that discuss the development of transcription systems. It is noteworthy that the volume is accompanied by an online booklet that provides links to videos and excerpts from rare manuscripts (including portraits, descriptive texts, and demonstrations of instruments like the kymograph). This book will be of particular [End Page 171] interest to phoneticians and advanced students of phonetics as well as to those who study the history of linguistics. More generally, anyone who carries out computer-based analysis of speech—using software such as Praat, for example—will find useful historical nuggets that inspire an appreciation of and reflection on the origins of current notational and instrumental practices. [End Page 172] Wladyslaw Cichocki University of New Brunswick (Canada) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French
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Jan 1, 2024
Shuai Liu 
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