A lexical database tool for quantitative phonological research

A lexical database tool tailored for phonological research is described. Database fields include transcriptions, glosses and hyperlinks to speech files. Database queries are expressed using HTML forms, and these permit regular expression search on any combination of fields. Regular expressions are passed directly to a Perl CGI program, enabling the full flexibility of Perl extended regular expressions. The regular expression notation is extended to better support phonological searches, such as search for minimal pairs. Search results are presented in the form of HTML or LaTeX tables, where each cell is either a number (representing frequency) or a designated subset of the fields. Tables have up to four dimensions, with an elegant system for specifying which fragments of which fields should be used for the row/column labels. The tool offers several advantages over traditional methods of analysis: (i) it supports a quantitative method of doing phonological research; (ii) it gives universal access to the same set of informants; (iii) it enables other researchers to hear the original speech data without having to rely on published transcriptions; (iv) it makes the full power of regular expression search available, and search results are full multimedia documents; and (v) it enables the early refutation of false hypotheses, shortening the analysis-hypothesis-test loop. A life-size application to an African tone language (Dschang) is used for exemplification throughout the paper. The database contains 2200 records, each with approximately 15 fields. Running on a PC laptop with a stand-alone web server, the `Dschang HyperLexicon' has already been used extensively in phonological fieldwork and analysis in Cameroon.Comment: 7 pages, uses ipamacs.st

Strategies for Representing Tone in African Writing Systems

Tone languages provide some interesting challenges for the designers of new orthographies. One approach is to omit tone marks, just as stress is not marked in English (zero marking). Another approach is to do phonemic tone analysis and then make heavy use of diacritic symbols to distinguish the `tonemes' (exhaustive marking). While orthographies based on either system have been successful, this may be thanks to our ability to manage inadequate orthographies rather than to any intrinsic advantage which is afforded by one or the other approach. In many cases, practical experience with both kinds of orthography in sub-Saharan Africa has shown that people have not been able to attain the level of reading and writing fluency that we know to be possible for the orthographies of non-tonal languages. In some cases this can be attributed to a sociolinguistic setting which does not favour vernacular literacy. In other cases, the orthography itself might be to blame. If the orthography of a tone language is difficult to user or to learn, then a good part of the reason, I believe, is that the designer either has not paid enough attention to the function of tone in the language, or has not ensured that the information encoded in the orthography is accessible to the ordinary (non-linguist) user of the language. If the writing of tone is not going to continue to be a stumbling block to literacy efforts, then a fresh approach to tone orthography is required, one which assigns high priority to these two factors. This article describes the problems with orthographies that use too few or too many tone marks, and critically evaluates a wide range of creative intermediate solutions. I review the contributions made by phonology and reading theory, and provide some broad methodological principles to guide someone who is seeking to represent tone in a writing system. The tone orthographies of several languages from sub-Saharan Africa are presented throughout the article, with particular emphasis on some tone languages of Cameroon

Dschang syllable structure

The syllable structure of Dschang is interesting for a variety of reasons. Most notable is the aspiration which can appear on most consonant types, including voiced stops. I shall argue that aspiration is best viewed as moraic, contributing to the weight of a syllable. An understanding of the syllable structure also gives valuable insights into the phonemic inventory and the distributional asymmetries, and helps to explain some curious morphophonemic vowel alternations in the imperative construction

Automated tone transcription

In this paper I report on an investigation into the problem of assigning tones to pitch contours. The proposed model is intended to serve as a tool for phonologists working on instrumentally obtained pitch data from tone languages. Motivation and exemplification for the model is provided by data taken from my fieldwork on Bamileke Dschang (Cameroon). Following recent work by Liberman and others, I provide a parametrised F_0 prediction function P which generates F_0 values from a tone sequence, and I explore the asymptotic behaviour of downstep. Next, I observe that transcribing a sequence X of pitch (i.e. F_0) values amounts to finding a tone sequence T such that P(T) {}~= X. This is a combinatorial optimisation problem, for which two non-deterministic search techniques are provided: a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm. Finally, two implementations---one for each technique---are described and then compared using both artificial and real data for sequences of up to 20 tones. These programs can be adapted to other tone languages by adjusting the F_0 prediction function.Comment: 12 pages, 4 postscript figures, uses examples.sty, newapa.sty, latex-acl.sty, ipamacs.st

Orthography and Identity in Cameroon

The tone languages of sub-Saharan Africa raise challenging questions for the design of new writing systems. Marking too much or too little tone can have grave consequences for the usability of an orthography. Orthography development, past and present, rests on a raft of sociolinguistic issues having little to do with the technical phonological concerns that usually preoccupy orthographers. Some of these issues are familiar from the spelling reforms which have taken place in European languages. However, many of the issues faced in sub-Saharan Africa are different, being concerned with the creation of new writing systems in a multi-ethnic context: residual colonial influences, the construction of new nation-states, detribalization versus culture preservation and language reclamation, and so on. Language development projects which crucially rely on creating or revising orthographies may founder if they do not attend to the various layers of identity that are indexed by orthography: whether colonial, national, ethnic, local or individual identity. In this study, I review the history and politics of orthography in Cameroon, with a focus on tone marking. The paper concludes by calling present-day orthographers to a deeper and broader understanding of orthographic issues

When marking tone reduces fluency: an orthography experiment in Cameroon

Should an alphabetic orthography for a tone language include tone marks? Opinion and practice are divided along three lines: zero marking, phonemic marking and various reduced marking schemes. This paper examines the success of phonemic tone marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language which uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants with a variety of ages and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography were tested on location in the Western Province of Cameroon. All but one had attended classes on tone marking. Participants read texts which were marked and unmarked for tone, then added tone marks to the unmarked texts. Analysis shows that tone marking degrades reading fluency and does not help to resolve tonally ambiguous words. Experienced writers attain an accuracy score of 83.5% in adding tone marks to a text, while inexperienced writers score a mere 53%, which is not much better than chance. The experiment raises serious doubts about the suitability of the phonemic method of marking tone for languages having widespread tone sandhi effects, and lends support to the notion that a writing system should have `fixed word images'. A critical review of other experimental work on African tone orthography lays the groundwork for the experiment, and contributes to the establishment of a uniform experimental paradigm

Annotation Graphs and Servers and Multi-Modal Resources: Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Education, Research and Development

Annotation graphs and annotation servers offer infrastructure to support the analysis of human language resources in the form of time-series data such as text, audio and video. This paper outlines areas of common need among empirical linguists and computational linguists. After reviewing examples of data and tools used or under development for each of several areas, it proposes a common framework for future tool development, data annotation and resource sharing based upon annotation graphs and servers.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure