the university of chicago the phonology and ... - SIL International

CHAPTER 8
ACOUSTIC PHONETICS
While phonological analysis is sufficient for identifying contrastive segments in
Mono, there are at least two potential problems with it. First, impressionistic phonetic
transcription is a methodology subject to human error. Linguistic researchers struggle
with the difficult task of identifying unfamiliar contrasts, many of which may escape their
hearing during the initial stages of fieldwork. And they must overcome the bias of their
own mother tongue’s phonological system, which colors the way they hear the sounds
they are transcribing. Studying the acoustic phonetic details of sounds offers a check on
the accuracy of phonetic transcription.
Second, the identification of phonological categories in Mono and the subsequent
assignment of certain symbols to those categories may give the false impression of
identity with similar sounds in other languages. Simply put, just because researchers
describing two different languages use the same symbol for a particular phoneme does
not necessarily mean that the two sounds are in fact pronounced the same. This issue is
crucial for those who study linguistic typology. By giving more detailed acoustic data for
specific sounds, I hope to give readers a clearer picture of what I mean by my phonetic
transcription.
The data for this chapter were obtained during two recording sessions. The first
set of recordings was made in Bili on September 26, 1994 using a Marantz PMD 420
analog tape recorder and a Shure dynamic microphone. The subject, Speaker M, was an
adult male native speaker of Mono, about 35 years old. We recorded the 204-item word
list found in Olson (1996) as well as 47 phrases, listed in Appendix E. The subject read
124