Researches in Experimental Phonetics; The Study of Speech Curves (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 Excerpt: ...words "My ancestors, having arrived in this country among the early settlers, on the one side in New York, on the other in New England, and, having fallen in love and married in the old-fashioned way"; the sentence concludes "without regard to race or creed, I can claim the membership of nearly every one of the National Society." (The thought in the mind of the speaker was evidently "relationship of nearly every member," etc.) The measurements and the plot were made as described above; the scale for the X-axis in plate xu is 1mm. = 0.025s. A small scale is desirable when the general course of melody is to be studied, as with the large scale the eye gets no definite picture from the plot; for the same reason a smooth line is drawn among the dots instead of a zigzag from dot to dot. The first line of text in plate xu gives the phonetic letters, the left edge of each being placed under the point of the curve at which its sound began. The second line of text gives the words spoken; the third line gives the numbers of the lines in the original plates of the speech curve. Confining ourselves on the present occasion to the general features of the melody, we note that in the first phrase the melody rises somewhat suddenly at the start according to the typical convex form for the American sentence. Instead, however, of completing the convexity it rises suddenly at the end. The average tone is rather low. This form of melody gives a special emotional character to the phrase, for which no appropriate terms exist. In fact, our language is almost totally deficient in terms for emotional expression, and we can define the expressive character of the melody here only by saying that it is the one appropriate for a solemn statement in an oration...