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SUMMARY:The phonetic building blocks of speech - Professor Francis Nolan (
 University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20150312T160000Z
DTEND:20150312T173000Z
UID:TALK58016@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Theodora Alexopoulou
DESCRIPTION:The original version of this talk was prompted by an invitatio
 n to the conference with the same title organised to celebrate the career 
 of the phonetician John Esling. In it\, I consider whether in reality ther
 e is an inventory of sounds\, along the lines of the IPA framework\, from 
 which languages can select to make their phonemes and ‘extrinsic’ allo
 phones\, or whether\, given the multiple degrees of freedom inherent in th
 e vocal tract\, sounds are infinitely variable across languages\, and phon
 etic categories exist merely by dint of analysts imposing them on a contin
 uously variable phonetic space. In answering this question we need to cons
 ider the role of ‘articulatory settings’\, long term configurational t
 rends which may characterise speech in a given language\, or indeed a give
 n speaker. Can we abstract away from variation in the realisation of a put
 ative ‘phonetic category’ by attributing it to a language-specific voc
 al ‘gait’ which imposes itself on the individual steps – i.e. sounds
 ? Ultimately\, I conclude that ‘building site’ metaphors may be inappr
 opriate. Instead\, an imp(r)udent analogy will be proposed with a  model i
 n another area of science.
LOCATION:Lecture Block\, Room 5\, Sidgwick Site
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