Call for Papers
The Editors, Advisory Editors and Editorial Board of Phonetica recognise the
need to continue asking new questions in speech analysis and having renewed
discussions of its theoretical underpinnings. We believe that a special issue of
the Journal is an ideal platform to initiate a scientific exchange that touches on
the very essence of speech research, and we have therefore decided to edit such
a volume. The theme we propose for it is
Progress in Experimental Phonology
From communicative function to phonetic substance and vice versa.
This theme refers to research into speech communication, investigating the bidirectional function – exponency relation with experimental procedures. That
seems to us to capture fundamental issues for future investigation and will most
likely attract great interest in the field generally and among the readership of
Phonetica in particular. The following paragraphs set out the motivation and the
aim for the thematic issue and provide guidelines for contributions.
Theoretical and methodological background
Speech research has been working with many conceptual dichotomies. The most
pervasive and at the same time the most persistent is the fundamental partition
into two disciplines, phonetics and phonology, with their time-honoured links to
the natural sciences and the humanities/social sciences, respectively. This methodology-induced split led to the postulates of phonetic substance vs linguistic
form and of the theoretical priority of the latter.
Another dichotomy is the one between (linguistic) form and (communicative)
function, again giving priority to the former. Thus linguistic form assumes a
pivotal role mediating between substance and function, which entails that the
substance – function link can only be indirect. But this linguistic perspective
excludes a large number of phenomena which arguably show a direct link between phonetic substance and communicative function, for example the 'Frequency Code', or phonation types indexing speaker-hearer relationships.
The prime rank attributed to linguistic form engenders another dichotomy, especially in discussions on speech prosody, viz. the distinction between linguistic
and paralinguistic functions. For the phonetic manifestations of the former, discrete and categorical oppositions are postulated, in accordance with the concept
of linguistic form, which gives them theoretical priority over the continuous and
gradual scaling of the latter. The central role of linguistic function in speech has
its origin in the phonology of words, where it serves the purpose of representing
1
lexical differentiation. But at the level of the utterance, paralinguistic functions
need to be put in focus because they are central to communication and of great
interest to the social sciences.
Then there is a traditional dichotomy that cuts across the ones of substance, form
and function, i.e. the partition of speech into segmentals (vocal tract and excitation mode) and suprasegmentals (fundamental frequency, intensity, duration),
more particularly into phonemes and prosodies, where the former have gained
theoretical priority and have determined the way the latter are investigated. This
division plays down the facts (1) that the separation of segmentals and suprasegmentals may be drawn differently, giving prosodic status to articulatory
properties, and (2) that the two domains interact, with prosodies determining the
manifestation of segments, and segmental manifestations signalling prosodic
categories and boundaries. In addition, the theoretical significance of phonemic
segments as autonomous speech recognition units has been questioned.
Finally the scientific community has become accustomed to attributing investigations either to the field of production or of perception. This dichotomy loses
sight of the central role of the listener in speech communication. On the one
hand, the speaker produces and adjusts speech in varying contexts of situation
for the listener, and, on the other hand, not everything that is in the acoustic
signal, due to articulatory constraints, is relevant in the decoding by the listener,
nor, as a result of auditory transformation, is every acoustic property of the signal perceived unaltered by the listener. So analyses of speech production, in
corpus as well as in experimental data, need to consider the perceptual relevance
of articulatory and acoustic patterns.
All these dichotomies have had a great heuristic value in speech analysis, but
there comes a point where further insight seems likely to be limited if we maintain them, i.e. the divisions need to be broken down and replaced by new conceptualizations. Laboratory Phonology, as represented by the biennial conference and proceedings series, has been working quite extensively at bridging the
gap between phonetics and phonology. While we believe that this approach has
substantially advanced our understanding of a large variety of phenomena, we
also believe that important aspects of speech, though not overlooked by laboratory phonologists, need far more attention than they have received. Especially,
when the focus shifts from words of scripted speech to unscripted, spontaneous
utterances, the whole spectrum of communicative functions, over and above
linguistic form, becomes relevant, and requires new methods, for example further development of what has already been initiated in conversation analysis.
Moreover, the dichotomies of linguistic vs paralinguistic phenomena and functions, and of suprasegmental vs segmental properties of speech, as well as the
central role of the listener need renewed attention.
2
Aim of the thematic issue
The last two decades have seen a growing interest in collecting and annotating
large speech databases, in many languages and of various speaking styles, including different forms of unscripted communication in a variety of scenarios.
Annotations have been orthographic, phonemically or phonetically segmental,
and prosodic, with reference to the existing dichotomies. These symbolizations
are heuristic devices to systematize large corpora for speech analysis, which
now needs to transcend the established paradigms and focus on communicative
functions in spontaneous interaction. This is the point of departure for the
scheduled thematic issue of Phonetica. The specifications for contributions,
listed below, are not an ad hoc collection of understudied phenomena but aim
instead at setting a frame for function-oriented experimental phonology, deriving phonological structures through experimental procedures applied to phonetic
substance.
Contributions are sought that combine the following features:

they look at the relationship between communicative functions and their
phonetic manifestations in production and perception, paying attention to
various aspects of
prosody
phonation types/voice quality
articulation
beyond the segmental phoneme

they are based on contextualized speech data
either unscripted speech corpora from various interaction scenarios
or scripted utterances embedded in contexts of situation, constructed for systematic production and perception experiments

they transcend case studies and aim at deriving general communicative
patterns
for a specific language
for culturally bound language groups
for human language, with reference to biological codes

they go beyond simple measurement in pre-established phonological categories

and their aims are any of the following:
descriptive: presentations of data from a variety of languages
theoretical: contributions to a theory of speech communication
methodological: new paradigms, appropriate for the analysis of
speech interaction.
3
Editorial guidelines and schedule
The total space available for the volume will be around 180 pages. So we expect
contributions of 10 to 12 printed pages each on average. Submissions need to
follow the Phonetica style sheet (cf. Instructions to Authors in any recent issue
and www.karger.com/electronic_submission) and should include Word or Latex
as well as pdf files. The dates of the editing schedule are as follows:
by 14 February, 2005: submission by email attachment to kk@ipds.uni-kiel.de
of an 800 word abstract, in addition to giving title, author(s), affiliation(s), email address of main author
28 February, 2005:
notification of authors whether the editorial team consider the proposed papers suitable contributions to the
theme, and, if so, invitation to submit full versions for
review
by 17 June, 2005:
electronic submission of Word/Latex and pdf files as
attachments to kk@ipds.uni-kiel.de, to be sent out for
review
29 July, 2005:
intimation of final decision about acceptance for publication in the special issue, including reviewers’ comments and suggestions for revision
by 4 October, 2005:
submission of final versions – two paper copies, and
disk containing Word/Latex and pdf files
end of 2005:
publication.
We are looking forward very much to receiving plenty of interesting papers and
to compiling an exciting issue of Phonetica on a forward-looking theme.
The Editorial Team
4