The Structure Of Spoken Language

An innovative and unified grammar of sentence intonation, applied to six Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian).

This accessible text is split into 2 halves. Initially, Janet Townend takes the reader through the early development and the structure and usage of spoken English. In the second half Jean Walker explains the history and structure of written English, including word formation and grammar. It is unusual to find both aspects of this fascinating area of human activity combined in one volume. These insights form an essential foundation for teachers, student teachers, teacher trainers, and specialists in special needs and literacy. It will be of interest to all who speak and write, and are involved in helping others to do so. Janet Townend trained as a speech and language therapist and Jean Walker as an English teacher. Both are now specialist teachers and trainers in the field of dyslexia, literacy and language.

Publisher Description

What is the best way to analyze spontaneous spoken language? In their search for the basic units of spoken language the authors of this volume opt for a corpus-driven approach. They share a strong conviction that prosodic structure is essential for the study of spoken discourse and each bring their own theoretical and practical experience to the table. In the first part of the book they segment spoken material from a range of different languages (Russian, Hebrew, Central Pomo (an indigenous language from California), French, Japanese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese). In the second part of the book each author analyzes the same two spoken English samples, but looking at them from different perspectives, using different methods of analysis as reflected in their respective analyses in Part I. This approach allows for common tendencies of segmentation to emerge, both prosodic and segmental.

Spoken Arabic is different in many respects from literary Arabic. This book is concerned with speakers’ intentions and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this work will be of interest to both students and researchers.

This book takes the reader on a journey through the structure of everyday spoken English, providing a fresh look at the relation between language and the mind.

"One of the most remarkable features of phonation is the disruption of the normal respiratory cycle. Indeed, outside phonation, the normal cycle of respiration presents a comparable duration for both the inspiration and the expiration (top of Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1 Respiration cycle, without phonation (top) and with phonation (bottom) The first produced prosodic units are breath groups. At early stages of language learning, children mainly use the necessary silent pause in the inspiration phase of their respiratory cycle as boundary markers of these units. The phonation process results from the air flow generated by the lung compression during the respiration-expiration phase. This air flow generates the necessary subglottal pressure needed to produce the vibration of the vocal folds for voiced sounds (vowels, voiced consonants), friction for fricative consonants, and intraoral pressure to allow the production of stop consonants"--