School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Prosodic phonology and raddoppiamento sintattico: a re-evaluation
    ABSALOM, MATTHEW ; HAJEK, JOHN ( 2006)
    The phenomenon known as raddoppiamento sintattico (RS) in Italian has been used to justify the notion of the phonological phrase in prosodic phonology. However, careful consideration of the application of the theory itself as well as a number of empirical problems raised by other scholars do not support the notion that the phonological phrase is useful in describing RS.
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    Raddoppiamento sintattico and glottalization phenomena in Italian: a first phonetic excursus
    STEVENS, M. ; HAJEK, J. ; ABSALOM, MATTHEW ( 2002)
    This study is a preliminary phonetic exploration of aspects of the well-known Italian sandhi phenomenon of Raddoppiamento sintattico (henceforth RS), which involves the gemination of word-initial consonants under certain conditions, eg dei [k]ani ‘some dogs’ but tre [kk]ani ‘three dogs’. It is often assumed that RS C-gemination is regular, but there is increasing evidence that it competes with other phenomena such as vowel lengthening. This study first discusses results of our auditory study of RS contexts, which show that RS is far less frequent in spontaneous speech than is theoretically predicted. This paper then looks specifically at glottal stop insertion and creak in RS contexts, based on the results of an initial small-scale acoustic investigation. The first has controversially been reported as occurring in RS environments where it serves to block RS (Absalom & Hajek, 1997). In addition, glottal stops have also been claimed to provide a coda to short word-final stressed vowels outside of RS environments (Vayra, 1994). We discuss our unexpected finding that glottalization characterizes phrase boundaries in our spontaneous speech data, and the implications that this evidence may have for the phonetic and phonological description of Italian and for our understanding of RS.
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    Languages and culture in Australia in the 21st century: riding the multilingual tiger
    HAJEK, JOHN (Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training, 2001)
    The rise of English as the world's dominant world language is seen by many as inevitable and permanent. While it might seem to bestow great advantage on native English-speakers, such an outcome is not guaranteed today or over time. It also runs the risk of disadvantaging English-speakers who are less inclined to see and grasp the benefits of multilingualism. History shows linguisitc predominance not to be permanent and there are compelling reasons - economic amongst them - in ensuring Australians are fluent in more than just English.
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    A typology of spreading, insertion and deletion or what you weren’t told about Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian
    ABSALOM, MATTHEW ; STEVENS, MARY ; HAJEK, JOHN (University of NSW, 2002)
    This paper focuses on the description and analysis of the external sandhi phenomenon of raddoppiamento sintattico (hereafter RS) in Italian, sometimes referred to as word-initial gemination. RS is one of the most discussed topics within Italian phonology, with the first description and treatment of the phenomenon dating back nearly 500 years. Theoretical analyses of RS since the 1970s, of whatever kind, seem to suggest that the facts of RS are clear and easy both to state and to analyze. Yet closer inspection shows RS not to occur in the manner claimed or predicted by these accounts. The aim of this paper is to highlight the empirical inadequacy of existing approaches to RS by illustrating the complex patterns that occur in RS environments.
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    Il Fenomeno del Raddoppiamento Sintattico nella Realta Linguistica Italiana
    ABSALOM, MATTHEW ; HAJEK, JOHN ; STEVENS, MARY (M. D'Auria Editore, 2004)
    Il presente contributo tratta il fenomeno del raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), noto negli studi linguistici italiani già da 500 anni. L’obiettivo principale di questo lavoro è “problematizzare” la descrizione del RS illustrando una serie di considerazioni che, a nostro avviso, vanno tenute presenti da chi vuole intraprendere un’analisi fonologica del processo in modo che rifletta la realtà linguistica italiana. La presente relazione può essere vista come una reazione alla visione “depurata” di un processo banalmente categorico come viene spesso presentato il RS negli studi fonologici scritti in lingua inglese. Tale immagine limitata è stata addirittura adoperata per motivare interi costrutti teorici come la frase fonologica della cosiddetta Fonologia Prosodica, motivazione successivamente messa in dubbio da vari studiosi fra cui una delle proponenti originali. Il presente lavoro verte su tre affermazioni che spesso emergono dai contributi teorici sul RS le quali saranno valutate rispetto al loro valore fattuale.
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    A Blueprint for a Comprehensive Australian English Auditory-Visual Speech Corpus
    Burnham, D ; Ambikairajah, E ; Arciuli, J ; Bennamoun, M ; Best, CT ; Bird, S ; Butcher, AR ; Cassidy, S ; Chetty, G ; Cox, FM ; Cutler, A ; Dale, R ; Epps, JR ; Fletcher, JM ; Goecke, R ; Grayden, DB ; Hajek, JT ; Ingram, JC ; Ishihara, S ; Kemp, N ; Kinoshita, Y ; Kuratate, T ; Lewis, TW ; Loakes, DE ; Onslow, M ; Powers, DM ; Rose, P ; Togneri, R ; Tran, D ; Wagner, M (Cascadilla Press, 2009)
    Contemporary speech science is driven by the availability of large, diverse speech corpora. Such infrastructure underpins research and technological advances in various practical, socially beneficial and economically fruitful endeavours, from ASR to hearing prostheses. Unfortunately, speech corpora are not easy to come by because they are both expensive to collect and are not favoured by the usual funding sources as their collection per se does not fall under the classification of ‘research’. Nevertheless they provide the sine qua non for many avenues of research endeavour in speech science. The only publicly available Australian speech corpus is the 12-year-old Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL) database (see http://andosl.anu.edu.au/; Millar, Dermody, Harrington, & Vonwillar, 1990), which is now outmoded due to its small number of participants, just a single recording session per speaker, low fidelity, audio-only rather than AV data, its lack of disordered speech, and limited coverage of indigenous and ethnocultural Australian English (AusE) variants. There are more up-to-date UK and US English language corpora, but these are mostly audio-only, and use of these for AusE purposes is not optimal, and results in inaccuracies.