This study examines the coda voicing effect in English on production of preceding vowel by comparing L1 and L2 speech. Particular attention is paid to how coda voicing contrast is encoded in temporal vs. spectral dimensions, how the effect interacts with information structure (with varying focus types), and how the use of information structure differs in L1 vs. L2. Both English (native) and Kor...

This study presents an approach to the task of automatically classifying and detecting speaking styles. The detection of speaking styles is useful for the segmentation of multimedia data into consistent parts and has important applications, such as identifying speech segments to train acoustic models for speech recognition. In this work the database consists of daily news broadcasts in Portugue...

This study explores the linguistic application of bipartite spectral graph partitioning, a graphtheoretic technique that simultaneously identifies clusters of similar localities as well as clusters of features characteristic of those localities. We compare the results using this approach to previously published results on the same dataset using cluster and principal component analysis (Shacklet...

This paper presents a constraint model for the interpretation of multilinear representations of speech utterances which can provide important fine-grained information for speech recognition applications. The model uses explicit structural constraints specifying overlap and precedence relations between features in both the phonological and the phonetic domains in order to recognise well-formed s...

One major objection to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory [Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 56–311; Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987] raised by Matsumoto [J. Pragmatics 12 (1988) 403; Multilingua 8 (1989) 207; Japanese/Korean Linguistics, vol. 2, Center for the Study of...

Over the course of the past several hundred years, advances in our understanding of sound change along with 20th century advances in phonetic science and phonological typology have given rise to a new landscape of sound patterns. A particular sound change in a particular language forms part of a population of similar sound changes with similar phonetic bases. Looking at this population, we can ...

(Lancaster University, UK) Abstract: The theory of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) has remained the most seminal and influential starting point for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contrastive pragmatics. Yet is has also provoked countervailing arguments from Ide (1989, 1993), Matsumoto (1989), Gu (1990), Mao (1994) and others, pointing out a Western bias in Brown and Levinson’...