- Email: [email protected]
In honor of Ilse Lehiste*
In honor of lise Lehiste * By Robert Channon and Linda Shockey (eds.) Dordrecht: Foris
P. Ladefoged Linguistics Dept , University of' California, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1543, U.S.A.
How can anyone review a book which reflects the incredibly wide influence of Ilse Lehiste? I hope that this review may be taken as a sign of the affection and esteem which I, too, feel for her. The book contains over 500 pages including a charming dedication, a useful biography and list of Lehiste's extensive publications, and 43 papers on a wide variety of topics, many of which are well beyond my competence. I shall simply discuss here some of the parts that readers of this journal are likely to find useful. As might be expected of a book that reflects the influence of Ilse Lehiste, some of the most interesting papers exemplify current thinking on suprasegmental aspects of speech. There is, for example, an excellent paper by Fischer-J0rgensen discussing the extent to which segment length is affected by larger units such as the syllable, the word, the foot , and the tone group. She presents new data just for Danish but she also aptly summarizes the conflicts and conclusions to be found in the literature on other languages. In another paper on timing, Lindblom and co-workers report an ingenious experiment in which the normal speech of six speakers of Swedish was compared with their production of the same utterances while speaking with the jaw fixed in an open position. As has been shown in other work (e.g. Lindblom, Lubker & Gay, 1979), subjects can reorganize the movements of the tongue and lips relative to the jaw so that they can produce virtually identical vocal-tract shapes irrespective of large differences in jaw position. The present paper shows that subjects also reorganize the timing of the movements so as to maintain the appropriate stress patterns. The authors conclude that there are "underlying temporal targets (their italics) largely independent of the processes of motor execution ." In direct contrast to Fowler (1980) they suggest that there are both intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of speech timing. A different theory of speech timing is proposed in the paper by Fujimura. This paper describes a seemingly more testable model than that in the two papers discussed above because it is explicitly formulated in terms of a mechanical model; but alas, I cannot see how to apply this model to actual measurements of speech data. I would need several completely worked out examples before I could use this scheme. The relation between phonetics and phonology is discussed in a paper on "Some Acoustical and Perceptual Correlates of Nasal Vowels" by Stevens, Fant & Hawkins. These authors use model studies based on acoustical theory to show that "The main effect of nasalization is the perturbation of the low-frequency spectrum by replacing the first formant with a pole-zero-pole combination". Their preliminary perceptual experiments involving synthesized Gujarati nasal and oral vowels basically support their theoretical finding, although they note that it might also be possible that Gujarati *Price: Hfl !75, US $ 87.50; cloth: ISBN 90-6765-!52-4.
250
Reviews
speakers use different degrees of velic openings for different vowels, in order to increase the perceptual nasality. They also speculate on whether there is "a common acoustic property corresponding to the feature (+nasal) that is at least consistent with physiological studies of responses of the auditory nerve," and conclude that it might be associated with the broad prominence with two peaks in a nasal vowel which would be considerably wider than a critical band . This would contrast with the single narrow prominence associated with an oral vowel. These attributes might well be those for the perceptual mechanism involved in contrasting nasal and oral vowels, but it seems obvious to me that they are not the basis for contrasting nasal and oral stops. Personally I do not see why one should expect that one should be able to find an invariant (or even a relatively invariant) acoustic or auditory correlate of a phonological feature. There is no reason why [+nasal] should have the same attributes when it occurs in conjunction with [+stop] and [-stop]. The feature complexes in a segment are interpreted as wholes and not independently. From my point of view, the search for invariant properties of phonological features is doomed to failure because it is based on a wrong view of the relation between phonetics and phonology. We should not be thinking of physical phonetics as beginning at the output of the phonology. I am much more in sympathy with another view expressed in this book in an interesting pair of papers: "Cognitive Phonetics-Some of the Theory" by Tatham and "Cognitive Phonetics-Some of the Evidence" by Morton. (Owing to the arrangement of the papers in the book in alphabetical order by author, the former unfortunately appears after the latter. I cannot imagine anyone other than a reviewer trying to read this book straight through, but the failure of the editors to group the papers appropriately is made very obvious in this case.) Tatham starts by noting that the subject matter of linguistics is "the encoding of thought into sound in such a way that adequate decoding of sound into thought is possible" . He then goes on to suggest that "in the contemporary study of language an operative phonology outputs a string of abstract objects which are captured by a phonetics whose job it is to render these objects as sounds." However, he finds that he has "a feeling of unease at the way phonetics is just tacked onto phonology" a feeling that I fully share. In Tatham's (and my) view, one can connect an abstract, cognitive, phonetics to phonology, but the non-abstract data of articulatory and acoustic phonetics must be related to a not-yet-existing neural account of language. Thus, as Morton puts it "Cognitive phonetics is about the mental processes involved in manipulating the vocal-tract mechanism. It is concerned with the control of the speech mechanism after the phonology has established the sound pattern of the language." Morton's paper is full of undocumented assertions (e.g. "the front/back range of variability in palatal consonants is narrower the more of these consonants a language has.") But I agree with her general conclusion (and have given references and documentation in a paper (Ladefoged , 1980) that came out after her paper was written). There is no doubt that languages differ in their cognitive phonetic control of phonological contrasts. I cannot note here all the other worthy contributions to this volume, and will comment only briefly on some of them. There is an interesting study by Cohen showing language and speaker dependent aspects of juncture. Eek discusses the very different notions of word stress in Estonian and Russian. Fromkin summarizes neurolinguistic evidence for a separate representation of prosody. Lisker and Abramson discuss an alleged case of fortis-lenis distinction in French, and find (not surprisingly for them) that it is "possibly entirely illusory." Ohala has a nice discussion of theories that attempt to account for the
Reviews
251
fact that high vowels have an intrinsically higher pitch than other vowels. He summarizes the evidence for the tongue pull theory (the pitch increase is due to the greater pull of the tongue on the larynx) and the acoustic coupling theory (the vibration of the vocal cords is affec ted by the resonance of the first formant). H e shows that the effect is greater when the jaw opening is increased by the use of a bite block, which would increase the tongue pull but not affect the resonance. Accordingly he concludes that the tongue pull theory accounts for the data better. This book is dated 1986 but did not actually appear until 1987. I infer that as it was intended to mark Ilse Lehiste's 60th birthday (in 1982), and as virtually all the references are to work done prior to 1982, these stud ies must be at least 5 years old when they appeared. There are some minor problems with the editing. The book is divided into two parts, phonetic studies and language studies, although on what basis it is hard to determine. There are papers in the first part (e.g. Nobre and Ingemann: O ral Vowel Reduction in Brazilian Portugese, and Slis: R ules for Assimilation of Voice in D utch) that might have been considered language studies, and some in the second (Harms: What Helmholtz Knew about N eutral Vowels) that are clearly contributions to general phonetics. There are few misprints, and only an occasional sub-editing error (e.g. a reference to F igure 4 instead of F igure 2 on page 125, and mention of " the /s/ infish on p . 178). But these are trivial points and on the whole the editors have served their teacher well. As the blurb on the back cover notes " IIse Lehiste has imprinted an idelible stamp on the development of linguistics and phonetics over the last decades." This book shows that we should be thankful not only for her own great scholarly contributions, but also for the wealth of other work that she has inspired. References Fowler, C. A. ( 1980) Coarticulation and theories of extrinsic timing. Journal of' Phonetics 8, 113-133. Ladefoged, P. (1980) What a re linguistic sounds made of? Language 56.3, 485- 502. Lindblom, B. , Lubker, J. & Gay, T. ( 1979) Formant frequencies of som e fixed-mandible vowels and a model of speech motor programming by predictive simulation. Journal of' Phonetics , 7, 147- 161.
P. Ladefoged Linguistics Dept , University of' California, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1543, U.S.A.
How can anyone review a book which reflects the incredibly wide influence of Ilse Lehiste? I hope that this review may be taken as a sign of the affection and esteem which I, too, feel for her. The book contains over 500 pages including a charming dedication, a useful biography and list of Lehiste's extensive publications, and 43 papers on a wide variety of topics, many of which are well beyond my competence. I shall simply discuss here some of the parts that readers of this journal are likely to find useful. As might be expected of a book that reflects the influence of Ilse Lehiste, some of the most interesting papers exemplify current thinking on suprasegmental aspects of speech. There is, for example, an excellent paper by Fischer-J0rgensen discussing the extent to which segment length is affected by larger units such as the syllable, the word, the foot , and the tone group. She presents new data just for Danish but she also aptly summarizes the conflicts and conclusions to be found in the literature on other languages. In another paper on timing, Lindblom and co-workers report an ingenious experiment in which the normal speech of six speakers of Swedish was compared with their production of the same utterances while speaking with the jaw fixed in an open position. As has been shown in other work (e.g. Lindblom, Lubker & Gay, 1979), subjects can reorganize the movements of the tongue and lips relative to the jaw so that they can produce virtually identical vocal-tract shapes irrespective of large differences in jaw position. The present paper shows that subjects also reorganize the timing of the movements so as to maintain the appropriate stress patterns. The authors conclude that there are "underlying temporal targets (their italics) largely independent of the processes of motor execution ." In direct contrast to Fowler (1980) they suggest that there are both intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of speech timing. A different theory of speech timing is proposed in the paper by Fujimura. This paper describes a seemingly more testable model than that in the two papers discussed above because it is explicitly formulated in terms of a mechanical model; but alas, I cannot see how to apply this model to actual measurements of speech data. I would need several completely worked out examples before I could use this scheme. The relation between phonetics and phonology is discussed in a paper on "Some Acoustical and Perceptual Correlates of Nasal Vowels" by Stevens, Fant & Hawkins. These authors use model studies based on acoustical theory to show that "The main effect of nasalization is the perturbation of the low-frequency spectrum by replacing the first formant with a pole-zero-pole combination". Their preliminary perceptual experiments involving synthesized Gujarati nasal and oral vowels basically support their theoretical finding, although they note that it might also be possible that Gujarati *Price: Hfl !75, US $ 87.50; cloth: ISBN 90-6765-!52-4.
250
Reviews
speakers use different degrees of velic openings for different vowels, in order to increase the perceptual nasality. They also speculate on whether there is "a common acoustic property corresponding to the feature (+nasal) that is at least consistent with physiological studies of responses of the auditory nerve," and conclude that it might be associated with the broad prominence with two peaks in a nasal vowel which would be considerably wider than a critical band . This would contrast with the single narrow prominence associated with an oral vowel. These attributes might well be those for the perceptual mechanism involved in contrasting nasal and oral vowels, but it seems obvious to me that they are not the basis for contrasting nasal and oral stops. Personally I do not see why one should expect that one should be able to find an invariant (or even a relatively invariant) acoustic or auditory correlate of a phonological feature. There is no reason why [+nasal] should have the same attributes when it occurs in conjunction with [+stop] and [-stop]. The feature complexes in a segment are interpreted as wholes and not independently. From my point of view, the search for invariant properties of phonological features is doomed to failure because it is based on a wrong view of the relation between phonetics and phonology. We should not be thinking of physical phonetics as beginning at the output of the phonology. I am much more in sympathy with another view expressed in this book in an interesting pair of papers: "Cognitive Phonetics-Some of the Theory" by Tatham and "Cognitive Phonetics-Some of the Evidence" by Morton. (Owing to the arrangement of the papers in the book in alphabetical order by author, the former unfortunately appears after the latter. I cannot imagine anyone other than a reviewer trying to read this book straight through, but the failure of the editors to group the papers appropriately is made very obvious in this case.) Tatham starts by noting that the subject matter of linguistics is "the encoding of thought into sound in such a way that adequate decoding of sound into thought is possible" . He then goes on to suggest that "in the contemporary study of language an operative phonology outputs a string of abstract objects which are captured by a phonetics whose job it is to render these objects as sounds." However, he finds that he has "a feeling of unease at the way phonetics is just tacked onto phonology" a feeling that I fully share. In Tatham's (and my) view, one can connect an abstract, cognitive, phonetics to phonology, but the non-abstract data of articulatory and acoustic phonetics must be related to a not-yet-existing neural account of language. Thus, as Morton puts it "Cognitive phonetics is about the mental processes involved in manipulating the vocal-tract mechanism. It is concerned with the control of the speech mechanism after the phonology has established the sound pattern of the language." Morton's paper is full of undocumented assertions (e.g. "the front/back range of variability in palatal consonants is narrower the more of these consonants a language has.") But I agree with her general conclusion (and have given references and documentation in a paper (Ladefoged , 1980) that came out after her paper was written). There is no doubt that languages differ in their cognitive phonetic control of phonological contrasts. I cannot note here all the other worthy contributions to this volume, and will comment only briefly on some of them. There is an interesting study by Cohen showing language and speaker dependent aspects of juncture. Eek discusses the very different notions of word stress in Estonian and Russian. Fromkin summarizes neurolinguistic evidence for a separate representation of prosody. Lisker and Abramson discuss an alleged case of fortis-lenis distinction in French, and find (not surprisingly for them) that it is "possibly entirely illusory." Ohala has a nice discussion of theories that attempt to account for the
Reviews
251
fact that high vowels have an intrinsically higher pitch than other vowels. He summarizes the evidence for the tongue pull theory (the pitch increase is due to the greater pull of the tongue on the larynx) and the acoustic coupling theory (the vibration of the vocal cords is affec ted by the resonance of the first formant). H e shows that the effect is greater when the jaw opening is increased by the use of a bite block, which would increase the tongue pull but not affect the resonance. Accordingly he concludes that the tongue pull theory accounts for the data better. This book is dated 1986 but did not actually appear until 1987. I infer that as it was intended to mark Ilse Lehiste's 60th birthday (in 1982), and as virtually all the references are to work done prior to 1982, these stud ies must be at least 5 years old when they appeared. There are some minor problems with the editing. The book is divided into two parts, phonetic studies and language studies, although on what basis it is hard to determine. There are papers in the first part (e.g. Nobre and Ingemann: O ral Vowel Reduction in Brazilian Portugese, and Slis: R ules for Assimilation of Voice in D utch) that might have been considered language studies, and some in the second (Harms: What Helmholtz Knew about N eutral Vowels) that are clearly contributions to general phonetics. There are few misprints, and only an occasional sub-editing error (e.g. a reference to F igure 4 instead of F igure 2 on page 125, and mention of " the /s/ infish on p . 178). But these are trivial points and on the whole the editors have served their teacher well. As the blurb on the back cover notes " IIse Lehiste has imprinted an idelible stamp on the development of linguistics and phonetics over the last decades." This book shows that we should be thankful not only for her own great scholarly contributions, but also for the wealth of other work that she has inspired. References Fowler, C. A. ( 1980) Coarticulation and theories of extrinsic timing. Journal of' Phonetics 8, 113-133. Ladefoged, P. (1980) What a re linguistic sounds made of? Language 56.3, 485- 502. Lindblom, B. , Lubker, J. & Gay, T. ( 1979) Formant frequencies of som e fixed-mandible vowels and a model of speech motor programming by predictive simulation. Journal of' Phonetics , 7, 147- 161.