VLC001 - Demo Course

Association lines are not allowed to cross!

If after the application of mapping some vowels are still free, they will be linked to the last tone on the right.

Received Pronunciation was originally defined as a regional standard associated with the south of England. Today, however, RP is merely an artificial construct which serves as a guideline for a socially more or less accepted standard of English, for example, the kind of English used by many BBC news readers. This variety had not received consideration at the outset.

In 'rhotic' accents /r/ is overtly realized in a wide variety of phonetic contexts, including post-vocalic environments, such as farm /fahrm/ or far /fahr/. In the non-rhotic accents /r/ is excluded from post-vocalic environments, thus /fɑ:m/ and /fɑ:/.

The rhotic accents include those typical of Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Barbados, certain western parts of England, and most of the United States, including General American.
The non-rhotic accents include those typical of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, certain parts of the United States, and most of England and Wales, including RP.

The autosegments are associated vertically across the tiers. Thus, this representation is similar to music where we the tune is given on one level and the text on another.

Structural Ambiguity is basically a question of "what goes with what" in a sentence: it occurs when the constituents (i.e. the elements of sentence structure) can relate to each other in different ways, even though none of the individual words in the sentence may be ambiguous.

Here are two interpretations of the Noun Phrase [very old men and women] (pictured above, as 'interpretation 0') which can be represented using simplified constituent analysis:

NP[very old [men and women]] >> Both men and women are old.

NP[[very old men] and [women]] >> The men are old, the women can be of any age.

The Levelt-Maassen Experiment consists of a series of test where the movement of objects  across a screen has to be described verbatim.

The Test Scenarios
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
Test 4

Select a test, click and say what you see.

Explanation:

In tests 1 to 3 well-known objects (rectangle and triangle) move across the screen: In sequential movements (test 1 and test 2) we favour coordinate sentence structures, in simultaneous movements (test 3) we use NP-coordination. If an object's denomination is difficult  to retrieve as in test in 4 (hexagon), we have to gain time and go back to sentence coordination, even if the movement occurs simultaneously. Thus, the retrieval of lexical items (i.e. phonetic planning) influences grammatical encoding.

Levelt W.J.M/Maassen B. 1981. Lexical Search and Order of Mention in Sentence Production. In W. Klein/W.J.M. Levelt. (eds.). Crossing the boundaries in Linguistics. Dordrecht: Reidel.

The examples illustrate the strong agglutinating character of Turkish. Furthermore, Turkish exhibits a strict SOV order irrespective of the sentence type:

Phrases	Sentences
kitap	Adam uyuyor.
kitaplar	Kadın uyudu.
büyük kitap	Adam kadını görüyor.
çok büyük kitap	... kadın adamı gördüğünde.
kitabın içinde	Adam kadına kitabı veriyor.
kitabın üzerinde

The examples illustrate the fusional character of Welsh. Furthermore, it is obvious that Welsh favors a VSO order but allows for other head-modifier patterns as well:

Phrases	Sentences
y llyfr	Mae'r dyn yn cysgu.
y llyfrau	Cysgodd y fenyw.
y llyfr mawr	Mae'r dyn yn gweld y fenyw.
y llyfr mawr iawn	... pan welodd y fenyw y dyn.
yn y llyfr	"Mae'r dyn yn rhoi'r llyfr i'r fenyw.
ar y llyfr