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the contrast with bin, where there is no aspiration, is noticeable. Some languages,
such as Hindi, have contrasts of aspiration applying to both voiceless
and voiced stops, viz. a four-way contrast of [p-], [p h -], [b-], and [b h -]. In some
phonetic environments the aspiration effect varies, as when in English the
plosives are followed by /l, r, w, j/: here the aspiration devoices these consonants,
as in please, twice, queue. Following initial /s/, the aspiration contrast
is lost altogether, as in [sp}n]. Sounds other than plosives may be aspirated, but
they are less commonly encountered. In a more detailed analysis, pre-aspiration
(aspiration before the consonant) can be distinguished from post-aspiration
(aspiration after the consonant); both features occur, for example, in Scottish
Gaelic. In nineteenth-century comparative philology, the term aspirate (or
aspirata) was applied to any sound involving audible breath in the articulation,
including voiceless plosives and fricatives. See also breathy.
assertion (n.) A term used in pragmatics and semantics in its ordinary sense
of presenting information as true, but also more technically for that portion of
the information encoded in a sentence which is presented by the speaker as
true, as opposed to that portion which is merely presupposed (see presupposition).
It is also used for sentences which present information as true, as opposed
to those which ask questions, issue commands, etc.
assign (v.) A term used in generative linguistics to refer to the action of rules;
rules attribute, or ‘assign’, structure to sentences. By the use of rewrite rules,
a string of elements is introduced as a series of stages, each assignment being
associated with a pair of labelled brackets, e.g.
S → NP + VP
VP → V + NP
NP → D + N
[NP + VP] S
[NP + [V + NP] VP ] S
[[D + N] NP + [V + [D + N] NP ] VP ] S
In such a way, the structure of noun phrase, verb phrase, etc., can be assigned
to any sentence to which these rules apply; e.g. [[the man] [saw [the dog]]].
assignment function In formal semantics, a term referring to a function
which maps variables onto their semantic values.
assimilation (n.) A general term in phonetics which refers to the influence
exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another, so that the
sounds become more alike, or identical. The study of assimilation (and its
opposite, dissimilation) has been an important part of historical linguistic
study, but it has been a much neglected aspect of synchronic speech analysis,
owing to the traditional manner of viewing speech as a sequence of discrete
words. If one imagines speech to be spoken ‘a word at a time’, with pauses
corresponding to the spaces of the written language, there is little chance that
the assimilations (or assimilatory processes) and other features of connected
speech will be noticed. When passages of natural conversation came to be
analysed, however, assimilation emerged as being one of the main means whereby
fluency and rhythm are maintained.