Turning away, for the moment, from Wikipedia's material on vowels (I'm still struggling with WP's ways of uploading and downloading sound and picture files), I've been having another look at the article on Prosody and trying to pin down why I find it so disappointing.
The lead paragraph is ok, I think. Note that is preceded by a warning from WP that the article needs more references to back up some of the statements. That should be easy enough to fix. However, instead of surveying the components of prosody one by one, we are led off into some rather marginal areas. The first section is headed "Classification" and takes us off into the use of different rhythmical types for language typology. This subject area, a bit of a minefield, is covered more fully in the article on Isochrony, which is gradually getting better. The last sentence in the Classification section reads "The classification of languages is done under the assumption that a language has "isochronous rhythm", meaning that there is an equal amount of time between stressed syllables, symbols (sic), or moras, depending on the category of language". Yes, well I think that needs some rewriting.
The next section is called "Acoustic attributes". What I want to say here may strike some readers as being a bit picky: I was brought up to distinguish between acoustic and auditory phonetics, where the former is concerned with physical, measurable properties of speech that can be studied in the laboratory, and the latter deals with subjective impressions and is concerned with the listener's experience in listening to speech (more about this in a future post). So when I find this section talking about "syllable weight, loudness and pitch", I feel that we are in the area of auditory, not acoustic attributes. Some of this material is not very scientific. We get some rather poetic stuff about tone and intonation in Mandarin, then the text moves on to a mention of stress: we are told about the difference between 'dessert' and 'desert' (arid place). The writer could, I feel, have used stress marks to make the point clearer. Then we get the example of the child screaming "give me dessert!" ("when the entire word is stressed "), an example I remember seeing in another WP article. I simply can't understand what point is being made here. At the end of the section the writer starts talking about vowel formants (rather than vowel quality, which is more or less the auditory equivalent and would have been a more appropriate term).
The next section concerns itself with the Domain of prosody, whatever that means. Early in this section we are told "these prosodic units are the actual phonetic "spurts", or chunks of speech. They need not correspond to grammatical units such as phrases and clauses, though they may; and these facts suggest insights into how the brain processes speech." I can see why WP feels that some references are needed to back up vague generalizations such as these. Later, we are told "In English, falling intonation indicates a declarative statement while rising intonation indicates an interrogative statement". As we know, this claim does not stand up when we study natural speech, but still the myth lingers on. Then there's an odd little paragraph about Hebrew morphophonology that seems to have wandered in from somewhere else. At the end of the section we get a para on the prosody of sarcasm, which doesn't seem to me to have much to do with the subject of the section.
And so to the next section, which is Emotion. We are told that the main WP article on this topic is Emotional Prosody, but that article and the section we are looking at here, though they seem to duplicate each other, seem to have been written from completely different standpoints. Here, in contrast with the sometimes woolly generalizations that we have had in earlier sections, we get a lot of indigestible facts and figures from some psychological studies of listeners' ability to recognize emotions in speech. My aversion to this is, I suppose, personal - I once got involved in research in this area, and hope never to go near it again! For the rest of this article the topic switches to neurophysiological aspects of prosody.
We should remember that each aspect of speech that is traditionally treated as part of prosody gets an article to itself in Wikipedia, so it's instructive to look at articles on Intonation, Stress, Rhythm, Speech Tempo and so on. But I feel that if a student just read the Prosody article in preparation for writing a paper on that subject they would end up with a pretty confused picture.
The lead paragraph is ok, I think. Note that is preceded by a warning from WP that the article needs more references to back up some of the statements. That should be easy enough to fix. However, instead of surveying the components of prosody one by one, we are led off into some rather marginal areas. The first section is headed "Classification" and takes us off into the use of different rhythmical types for language typology. This subject area, a bit of a minefield, is covered more fully in the article on Isochrony, which is gradually getting better. The last sentence in the Classification section reads "The classification of languages is done under the assumption that a language has "isochronous rhythm", meaning that there is an equal amount of time between stressed syllables, symbols (sic), or moras, depending on the category of language". Yes, well I think that needs some rewriting.
The next section is called "Acoustic attributes". What I want to say here may strike some readers as being a bit picky: I was brought up to distinguish between acoustic and auditory phonetics, where the former is concerned with physical, measurable properties of speech that can be studied in the laboratory, and the latter deals with subjective impressions and is concerned with the listener's experience in listening to speech (more about this in a future post). So when I find this section talking about "syllable weight, loudness and pitch", I feel that we are in the area of auditory, not acoustic attributes. Some of this material is not very scientific. We get some rather poetic stuff about tone and intonation in Mandarin, then the text moves on to a mention of stress: we are told about the difference between 'dessert' and 'desert' (arid place). The writer could, I feel, have used stress marks to make the point clearer. Then we get the example of the child screaming "give me dessert!" ("when the entire word is stressed "), an example I remember seeing in another WP article. I simply can't understand what point is being made here. At the end of the section the writer starts talking about vowel formants (rather than vowel quality, which is more or less the auditory equivalent and would have been a more appropriate term).
The next section concerns itself with the Domain of prosody, whatever that means. Early in this section we are told "these prosodic units are the actual phonetic "spurts", or chunks of speech. They need not correspond to grammatical units such as phrases and clauses, though they may; and these facts suggest insights into how the brain processes speech." I can see why WP feels that some references are needed to back up vague generalizations such as these. Later, we are told "In English, falling intonation indicates a declarative statement while rising intonation indicates an interrogative statement". As we know, this claim does not stand up when we study natural speech, but still the myth lingers on. Then there's an odd little paragraph about Hebrew morphophonology that seems to have wandered in from somewhere else. At the end of the section we get a para on the prosody of sarcasm, which doesn't seem to me to have much to do with the subject of the section.
And so to the next section, which is Emotion. We are told that the main WP article on this topic is Emotional Prosody, but that article and the section we are looking at here, though they seem to duplicate each other, seem to have been written from completely different standpoints. Here, in contrast with the sometimes woolly generalizations that we have had in earlier sections, we get a lot of indigestible facts and figures from some psychological studies of listeners' ability to recognize emotions in speech. My aversion to this is, I suppose, personal - I once got involved in research in this area, and hope never to go near it again! For the rest of this article the topic switches to neurophysiological aspects of prosody.
We should remember that each aspect of speech that is traditionally treated as part of prosody gets an article to itself in Wikipedia, so it's instructive to look at articles on Intonation, Stress, Rhythm, Speech Tempo and so on. But I feel that if a student just read the Prosody article in preparation for writing a paper on that subject they would end up with a pretty confused picture.
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