Tonal Activity in Kara, an Austronesian language spoken in New Britain

This paper presents the results of a small phonetic investigation of tonal activity in Kara, a little-known Austronesian language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Sketchy reports of some kind of tonal contrast in this language surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s, only to disappear in later published references to the language. Our auditory and acoustic investigations confirm the existence of contrastive tone in Kara. Native speaker intuitions also support such a conclusion. At least two tonemes (high and low) are identified. A third tone level (mid) is also noted but appears to be a variant of the low toneme

How pervasive is preaspiration? Investigating sonorant devoicing in Sienese Italian

We have recently found that voiceless geminates in Sienese Italian are frequently preaspirated, eg. /sette/ > [sehte] 'seven'. Within the few (mostly Scandinavian) languages that are reported to have preaspirated voiceless stops, a phonetically similar process of sonorant devoicing before voiceless stops is often reported to occur, eg. Icelandic /vitt/ [viht] ‘breadth’ and /lampi/ [lam8pI] 'lamp' (Hansson, 2001:157). Given that voiceless geminate stops are also frequently preaspirated in Sienese Italian, in this pilot study we investigate whether devoicing of sonorants might also occur, given the cooccurrence of the two phenomena in other preaspirating languages. Our preliminary investigation of /lt/ sequences in spontaneous speech (6 speakers) shows that sonorant devoicing is very frequent, occurring in 85% of all tokens analysed. We provide specific details of its frequency according to speaker, and context, as well as information about its acoustic characteristics

On the Acoustic Characterization of Ejective Stops in Waima’a

We examine some acoustic properties of ejective stops in Waima’a (an Austronesian language spoken in East Timor), and compare them with other voiceless stop types that occur in the language. Previous studies of ejectives in other languages have suggested that they may fall into two classes, strong and weak. We compare our Waima’a results with some existing findings in the literature, and suggest that while Waima’a ejectives might appear to be more appropriately characterized as strong on some criteria, they do not sit squarely in either category

Post-aspiration in standard Italian

Voiceless geminate stops in Italian are typically described as unaspirated in all positions (e.g. [1, 2]). However, recent acoustic phonetic analysis of part of a corpus of standard Italian speech data has shown that the geminate voiceless stops /pp tt kk/ are frequently realized with both preaspiration i.e. [hp: ht: hk:] (cf. [3]) and post-aspiration. This paper focuses on the latter phenomenon, presenting acoustic phonetic evidence in the form of VOT duration values for /pp tt kk/ tokens recorded in 15 Italian cities (based on the CLIPS corpus of spoken Italian [4, 5]). The co-occurrence of post-aspiration with preaspiration is considered and results are discussed with a focus on regional patterns

Smooth norms and approximation in Banach spaces of the type C(K)

We prove two theorems about differentiable functions on the Banach space C(K), where K is compact. (i) If C(K) admits a non-trivial function of class C^m and of bounded support, then all continuous real-valued functions on C(K) may be uniformly approximated by functions of class C^m. (ii) If C(K) admits an equivalent norm with locally uniformly convex dual norm, then C(K) admits an equivalent norm which is of class C^infty (except at 0)