Recent advances in cultural analytics and large-scale computational studies of art, literature and film often show that long-term change in the features of artistic works happens gradually. These ...findings suggest that conservative forces that shape creative domains might be underestimated. To this end, we provide the first large-scale formal evidence of the association between poetic meter and semantics in 18-19th century European literatures, using Czech, German and Russian collections with additional data from English poetry and early modern Dutch songs. Our study traces this association through a series of unsupervised classifications using the abstracted semantic features of poems that are inferred for individual texts with the aid of topic modeling. Topics alone enable recognition of the meters in each observed language, as may be seen from the same-meter samples clustering together (median Adjusted Rand Index between 0.48 and 1 across traditions). In addition, this study shows that the strength of the association between form and meaning tends to decrease over time. This may reflect a shift in aesthetic conventions between the 18th and 19th centuries as individual innovation was increasingly favored in literature. Despite this decline, it remains possible to recognize semantics of the meters from past or future, which suggests the continuity in meter-meaning relationships while also revealing the historical variability of conditions across languages. This paper argues that distinct metrical forms, which are often copied in a language over centuries, also maintain long-term semantic inertia in poetry. Our findings highlight the role of the formal features of cultural items in influencing the pace and shape of cultural evolution.
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This study investigates how accent features can be used in singing performances in order to index a specific identity. In particular, the study considers the accent and singing styles present in the ...music of Manchester band Oasis. Previous studies have highlighted the prominence of American accent features used by artists like The Beatles, to emulate the success of popular American singers; whereas artists associated with the indie genre often purposely subvert these expectations by embracing their own 'real' accents in their singing. A quantitative analysis of the occurrence of features from Simpson's (1999) USA-5 model in the 1994 songs Supersonic and Half the World Away, sung by frontmen Liam and Noel Gallagher respectively, is conducted in this study. These results are also compared to the brothers' 'real' accents using data from a 1994 interview. It is argued, as Liam uses more British English features in his singing, similar to that of his real speech, and Noel uses more American features, that the band did not index one specific identity. Rather, their use of different accent features indicates a multimodal identity that both appeals to a global audience and complements the genre and style of each individual song.
Accent Matters Pronk, Tijmen; Derksen, Rick
2011, Letnik:
37
eBook
The accentual systems of the Baltic and Slavic languages continue to intrigue scholars of general and historical linguistics. They play an important role in the reconstruction of the linguistic ...ancestor of Baltic and Slavic, but also in the typological study of accentual systems. This volume contains contributions related to the accentology of the Baltic and Slavic languages by leading scholars in the field. They discuss the accentual systems that are attested in Baltic and Slavic dialects and texts, and the historical developments that led to these systems. The volume further contains contributions on similar accentual systems and developments in other languages, such as Abkhaz and the Mordvinian languages. A number of papers also deal with the role of the Balto-Slavic accents in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. The volume reflects the progress that has been made in the field of Baltic and Slavic accentuation during the last decades. It forms a major source for anyone interested in the latest developments and insights in the study of accentuation.
How flexible is an individual's accent during adulthood, and how does this flexibility relate to longer-term change? Previous work has found that accents are remarkably flexible in conversational ...interaction, but predominantly stable over years, leading to very different views of the role of individuals in community-level sound change. This article examines MEDIUM-TERM accent dynamics (days to months) by taking advantage of a 'natural experiment': a reality television show where contestants live in an isolated house for three months and are constantly recorded, forming a closed system where it is possible to both determine the dynamics of contestants' speech from day to day and reason about the sources of any observed changes. We build statistical models to examine time dependence in five phonetic variables within individuals, in 14.5 hours of spontaneous speech from twelve English-speaking contestants. We find that time dependence in pronunciation is ubiquitous over the medium term: large daily fluctuations in pronunciation are the norm, while longer-term change over weeks to months occurs in a minority of cases. These patterns mirror the conflicting findings of previous work and suggest a possible bridge between the two. We argue that time dependence in phonetic variables is influenced by contrast between sounds, as well as systematic differences between speakers in how malleable their accents are over time; however, we find only limited evidence for convergence in individuals' accents. Our results have implications for theories of the role of individuals in sound change, and suggest that medium-term pronunciation dynamics are a fruitful direction for future work.*
The framework of dynamical systems offers powerful tools to understand the relation between stability and variability in human cognition in general and in speech in particular. In the current paper, ...we propose a dynamical systems approach to the description of German nuclear pitch accents in focus marking to account for both the categorical as well as the continuous variation found in intonational data. We report on results from 27 native speakers and employ an attractor landscape to represent pitch accent types in terms of f0 measures in a continuous dimension. We demonstrate how the same system can account for both the categorical variation (relative stability of one prosodic category) as well as the continuous variation (detailed modifications within one prosodic category). The model is able to capture the qualitative aspects of focus marking such as falling vs. rising pitch accent types as well as the quantitative aspects such as less rising vs. more rising accents in one system by means of scaling a single parameter. Furthermore, speaker group specific strategies are analysed and modelled as differences in the scaling of this parameter. Thus, the model contributes to the ongoing debate about the relation between phonetics and phonology and the importance of variation in language and speech.
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Thinking with an Accent casts accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception shaping our global cultural economy. Theorizing accent as a mediatized object, an interdisciplinary ...method, and an embodied practice, this volume invites readers to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical, multisensorial inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. “There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, yet theories of voice still treat accents as the exception. Thinking with an Accent teaches us how to begin from accented voices and provides a panoply of tools for imagining, working with, building on, analyzing, and desiring accents.” — JONATHAN STERNE, author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment “This creative and ambitious collection encourages us to reconsider our own accented lives and how they structure our social, digital, and literary worlds. An essential book.” — DOLORES INÉS CASILLAS, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy “This book teaches us that the accent must be understood not as an ontological reality but as a co-constituted happening. The result is that accent becomes something to think with, not just to study. Straightforward, well argued, and a pleasure to read.” — KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI, author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife"
The importance of pre-nuclear prominences for focus marking has been largely neglected. Recent studies, however, present first evidence that the prosody of the pre-nuclear region indicates its status ...as part of a broad focus or as pre-focal. This study presents a systematic investigation of the pre-nuclear domain and its relation to the nuclear accent in German. The results show that the realization of the pre-nuclear domain indeed depends on whether it is focal or pre-focal: The pre-nuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima and larger durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of a pre-focal, pre-nuclear domain depends on the following focus: The pre-nuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The comparison to the nuclear accent suggests an inverse relationship, i.e., the pre-nuclear domain becomes less prominent when the nuclear domain becomes more prominent. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains and entails the modulation of phrasal prominence profiles rather than just local adjustments of the nucleus.
This paper investigates the distribution of surface accents in Lithuanian nominals based on data from Standard Lithuanian. Inflected nouns and adjectives in this language are subject to the following ...major accent rules: (a) the Basic Accentuation Principle (Halle & Vergnaud 1987a; b); (b) the Saussurean Accent Shift (Blevins 1993, Ambrazas 2006). I argue that one can account for both in a system where underlying lexical accents can vary in strength. This approach provides advantages compared to the analysis presented in Blevins (1993). For instance, in order to determine the placement of the accent within a weak stem, one does not have to resort to extraprosodicity or floating tones, thanks to a weak accent being present in the UR. The Saussurean Accent Shift, for which Blevins’s paper accounts only partially (see Section 5), is analyzed as an edge effect whereby a clash of two underlying accents at the right edge of a prosodic word results in the surface accent being right-aligned.
Purpose: This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech--regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical ...processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Forty-three prelingually deaf adolescent and adult CI users and 44 NH peers completed a regional dialect categorization task, which consisted of identifying the region of origin of an unfamiliar talker from six dialect regions of the United States. They also completed an intelligibility rating task, which consisted of rating the intelligibility of short sentences produced by native and nonnative (foreign-accented) speakers of American English on a scale from 1 (not intelligible at all) to 7 (very intelligible). Individual performance was compared to demographic factors and sentence recognition scores. Results: Both CI and NH groups demonstrated difficulty with regional dialect categorization, but NH listeners significantly outperformed the CI users. In the intelligibility rating task, both CI and NH listeners rated foreign-accented sentences as less intelligible than native sentences; however, CI users perceived smaller differences in intelligibility between native and foreign-accented sentences. Sensitivity to accent differences was related to sentence recognition accuracy in CI users. Conclusions: Prelingually deaf, long-term CI users are sensitive to accent variability in speech, but less so than NH peers. Additionally, individual differences in CI users' sensitivity to indexical variability was related to sentence recognition abilities, suggesting a common source of difficulty in the perception and encoding of fine acoustic-phonetic details in speech.
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This book analyses Cairenes' interlingual errors in English main word stress following Halle and Vergnaud's (1987) metrical model and Archibald's (1998) parameter resetting. The findings show the ...difficulty the research subjects had in stressing items with stress different from Cairene Colloquial Arabic (CCA) and with stress similar to CCA. The book also shows that the subjects' correct stress patterns were due to parameter resetting, and that English stress patterns that are both different and more marked than corresponding CCA stress patterns caused learning difficulties for the subjects.
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