Overview
You made it! You are now the expert in your consultant’s speech. All of the hard parts of the final project are done, now you just have to put them together.
Goal
● Clearly explain the similarities and differences between your consultant’s speech and the way their language is described in your main reference source.
● Use the IPA to communicate your findings to other linguists/phoneticians,
● Use your knowledge of acoustic phonetics to support your claims with evidence from spectrograms and/or waveforms.
To do:
❏ Finalize consonant and vowel charts
❏ Describe the language’s sound system based on your main source[1]
❏ Compare/contrast what your speaker did with your source’s description
❏ Identify area(s) where acoustic images can help support your description(s) and create image(s) in Praat
Checklist before submitting:
❏ Read your paper to yourself out loud to catch spelling mistakes and grammatical errors
❏ Consider exchanging papers with a classmate for help with proofreading & clarity
❏ Make sure you have adequately cited your source material. If you include any quotes, they must be cited in the text of the paper. Avoid accidental plagiarism by paraphrasing information from your sources in your own words.
❏ Make sure the filenames of your recording and TextGrid match (except for the file extension)
To submit:
The final project will be submitted on BruinLearn. You will turn in:
❏ Final paper (.pdf file) – aim for 8-10 pages (tables, images, wordlist, and references not included)
❏ Your edited recording (.wav file)
❏ A TextGrid containing item numbers and glosses (.TextGrid file)
The paper
The first three paragraphs of the paper will basically be the same as your first preliminary report, updated with information about how you got the words for your wordlist and any new relevant information about your speaker’s background.
Then the paper should describe what the source(s) you consulted said about the phonemes and allophones of the language. Either interspersed in the same section or in a following section, you will discuss how your speaker actually produced the sounds, and how that compared with the expectations you had based on your sources.
Your paper will include at least one spectrogram and/or waveform as evidence to support your claim about some aspect of the language. This could be to demonstrate the difference between tones, a vowel length contrast, allophonic variation in voice-onset time, or anything else you can think of. Any acoustic images you include should be clearly labeled to show the reader what portion of the sound you are discussing. See below for instructions on how to get good images from Praat.
Suggested paper organization
As long as you include the bolded parts listed above, you are free to not follow these organization suggestions exactly.
Background (language and speaker, based on preliminary report)
Consonants
● Consonant chart (including only the rows/columns relevant for the language)
● Descriptions of consonants based on reference source, split into subsections by manner of articulation (follow the rows of the IPA chart).
● Use recorded items and/or minimal pairs to illustrate contrasts
○ If your speaker pronounced something differently than your source, discuss it here. Why do you think this pronunciation is different from your source’s prediction (briefly)?
Vowels
● Vowel chart
● Descriptions of vowels based on reference source
● Use recorded items and/or minimal pairs to illustrate what you are describing
○ For example, “Klingon has two front vowels /ɪ/ and /e/, as the minimal pair in #16 and #17 illustrate.”
Allophones (could be its own section, or could be included inside the consonant and vowel sections)
● Description of allophones according to reference sources
○ Did your speaker produce them as expected (if not, explain)
● Any allophones you discovered and where they occurred
Suprasegmentals (tone, stress, etc.)
● Description of suprasegmentals according to reference sources
○ Did your speaker produce them as expected (if not, explain)
● Use recorded items and/or minimal pairs to illustrate what you are describing Bibliography/References/Works Cited
● I don’t care what type of citation formatting you use, but it must be consistent throughout the paper
● Use parenthetical citations when citing information from a source the first time, but don’t keep citing the same major source for every fact (we know where your facts came from)
● Alphabetize your sources in the bibliography/reference list/works cited page
General suggestions
Throughout the paper, you will refer to items on your wordlist that provide examples of the sounds you are describing. You must at least provide the number of the item, and you can also give the transcription, orthography and gloss if necessary (this will take up more space, though, so just use the number if you’re concerned about the page limit).
When referencing an item in the text, you will usually need to include additional information to help us know what item you are referring to. The only mandatory piece of information in the item number, but you may also include transcription and/or orthography. If you do, you must also include the English gloss.
|
item number: |
#47 |
MANDATORY |
|
transcription: |
/xwex/ (and/or phonetic [χwex]) |
OPTIONAL |
|
orthography |
chwech |
OPTIONAL |
|
gloss |
‘six’ |
MANDATORY IF TRANSCRIPTION |
OR ORTHOGRAPHY IS INCLUDED
Example phrasing (references to items are shown in bold – you should not use bold in your paper):
“Jones (1921) described the Welsh dorsal fricative as uvular /χ/, but my consultant consistently produced it as the velar fricative /x/ (#31). Llinell only produced the uvular fricative in one
token, #47, as an allophone of /x/ before the labiovelar approximant.”
OR
“Jones (1921) described the Welsh dorsal fricative as uvular /χ/, but my consultant consistently produced it as the velar fricative /x/ (#31 /xi/ [xi] chi ‘you’). Llinell only produced the uvular fricative in one token, #47 /xwex/ [χwex] chwech ‘six’, as an allophone of /x/ before the labiovelar approximant.”
Example acoustic image (how to get a good image):
“My consultant was consistent in producing short vowels (#52) with shorter duration than long vowels (#53), as shown in Figure 1.”
Important tips/reminders for 103 term papers:
The goal of the paper
Your paper is (part of) an answer to the question “What makes this language sound the way it does?”, addressed to an IPA-educated and interested reader. This answer has two parts: the basic sounds and suprasegmentals of the language (phonemes), and how they are pronounced in their allowed combinations (allophones). The paper will focus more on the first part, but must also give something substantial about the second.
Only phonetics
Reference sources often have piles of interesting material on dialects, historical change, spelling, permitted syllable structures, and morphology. A little of this stuff is fine if you can relate it to the phonetic properties of your speaker, but remember that your goal is to write a phonetic description, under a rather tight length limit (if you go over say, 12 pages double spaced, we may not finish reading).
Only use IPA
Reference sources often use non-IPA symbols and terms. Don’t copy them: translate their symbols into IPA (use the Pullum & Ladusaw book on reserve at the library, or come see us for help with this if you like). Similarly, use only IPA terms, unless there is no obvious IPA equivalent.
HOWEVER, if we have discussed you using a system that is simpler to type (Pinyin tone marks, for example), you may use them as long as you provide the IPA equivalent symbols early on in your paper.
Proper citation
● Avoid inadvertent plagiarism by checking that every time you used information from a reference source, you credited the source, and either paraphrased the information, or put it in quote marks. It is not enough to assume that we will know you meant to credit the source.
● All the prose in your paper must either be written by you, or appear as direct quotes in quote marks. It is not appropriate to include long sections of a source verbatim, even if cited. In particular, you must not copy and paste paragraphs from the web.
● It is not appropriate for this paper to rely on any text generated from a tool like ChatGPT (or similar). Not only does relying on these tools prevent you from demonstrating what you have learned, it is also quite likely that the ‘information’ provided will be inaccurate. ‘AI’ tools are not intelligent, but you are, and so are your instructors.
● If all your information comes from a single source, it is sufficient to say so at the beginning of the paper, but then you must paraphrase in your own words. Do not cite the source for each word in your wordlist individually, but do make the sources of the words clear (maybe in a footnote or in the text).
● It is not enough to cite a source at the end of the paper; you must also indicate where you used that source in the text of the paper itself. See these links for understanding appropriate and inappropriate use of source material, including what counts as a proper paraphrase:
○ What is plagiarism (Purdue OWL)
○ Avoiding plagiarism (UCLA library)
○ Paraphrasing (UCLA Library)
Post-write-up checking
● Read the paper over to yourself OUT LOUD, using your judgment to detect stylistic problems to fix.
● Pretend you haven’t read the paper before, and watch out for things that will seem contradictory or confusing to the reader.
The complete project
The complete term project consists of: the paper (including the wordlist), the audio recording, and a corresponding TextGrid. The recording must be a .wav file. You must submit the paper and supplementary files to the assignment on BruinLearn.
How term projects are graded
1. The phonetic transcriptions are examined before reading the paper: do they reasonably represent what’s in the recording?
2. The paper is checked for including appropriate IPA phoneme charts.
3. The phonemic transcriptions are checked for using only the phonemes in the charts.
4. The wordlist is examined for clearly illustrating all the phonemes given in the charts, for providing a sampling of allophones of those phonemes, and for including at least one sentence.
5. The paper: does it clearly present what the source(s) said about the language? Does it explicitly and clearly relate the speaker’s pronunciations to the source material? Does the paper as a
whole give a good overall picture of how this speaker/this language sounds?
The term paper assignment includes a rubric showing the exact breakdown of points for the entire project.
How to capture an image from Praat
The simplest way to capture an image from Praat is to take a screenshot of the window, including the frequency and time axes. You may choose to include or exclude the waveform or spectrogram depending on what you want the viewer to focus on. Including a TextGrid in your screenshot can be useful, but you can also annotate your image in other ways (see below for suggestions).
Example image (bare minimum):
Figure 1: The spectrogram shows my consultant’s example sentence “SENTENCE” /sentence/ [sentence]. Observe the change in F1 and F2 of the diphthong shown in the middle of the image.
Example image (better than bare minimum):
Figure 1: The spectrogram shows my consultant’s example sentence “SENTENCE” /sentence/ [sentence]. The highlighted portion shows the change in F2 over the course of the diphthong [au].
Example image (better):
Figure 1: The spectrogram shows item #52 [ɡɹaund] ‘forest’. Formant tracking across the diphthong shows the convergence of F1 and F2 over time.
Example image (even better, because it includes target information in the TextGrid):
Figure 1: Vowel duration differences between lax and tense high front vowels were minor, indicating that length is not a major factor for my consultant in distinguishing these vowels.
Example image (not good):
No context, no axes, no indication of what I’m looking at, no transcription, no figure caption.
If it’s relevant for the point you’re trying to make, you may want to have Praat show format tracks (Formants > Show formants…) or pitch tracks (Pitch > Show pitch) or intensity (Intensity > Show intensity). Or, you can mark relevant characteristics of the spectrogram(s) yourself, annotating the images using an outside editing program. You could add arrows, highlight relevant portions of the sound, show where the boundaries between different sounds are, etc.
The most important things to remember are:
● your reader (me) should be able to understand what you want the image to show from looking at the image and caption alone
● keep image resolution reasonably high – if it’s too blurry or pixelated to read, I can’t grade your image
● images don’t count against your page limit, so feel free to make them large and easy to see
[1] Remember, if you had to bring in extra sources to fill in gaps, that’s okay, but only use them to fill in those gaps. Don’t waste time comparing everything that two different sources say, that is not the point of this project!