Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Descriptive phonetics'

Description detaillee de l'ensemble des caracteristiques phonetico-phonologiques du portugais du bresil. Les exemples analyses ne se limitent pas a une norme unique, mais a des occurences reelles de la langue orale de dix-sept etats (sur un total de vingt-trois) appartenant a toutes les regions du bresil. Cette analyse met en evidence les principaux axes du comportement phonique des bresiliens a travers la variete des composantes interregionales mises en jeu. Une comparaison avec le systeme normatif du portugal degage un grand nombre de particularites du portugais au bresil en ce qui concerne des sons nouveaux, ainsi que des performances nouvelles a partir de graphies existantes et prononcees tout autrement au portugal. Les points communs de la langue orale des deux pays sont egalement traites afin d'aboutir a une esquisse du systeme phonetique de la langue portugaise. En aires linguistiques. Un autre travail ("le bresil : la faillite de l'eldorado?") analyse les principaux problemes du bresil contemporain eu egard a sa formation socio-economique : grands cycles de produits d'exportation et leurs consequences, formation d'un marche interne, repartition des revenus, le "miracle" economique bresilien, la transnationalisation de l'economie et les caracteristiques de l'endettement exterieur du bresil
A detailed description of the whole system of brazil's portuguese sounds, following their acustical characteristics, must always be based on real occurences of oral language. They have been taken from the spontaneous language spoken by educated people in seventeen brazilian states (of the twenty-five which constitute the country). These pronunciations, seen outside a single pattern, show a great number of peculiarities of brazilian portuguese, such as new sounds and new oral performances from graphic portuguese supports already existent. It also shows common aspects of pronunciation in comparison with protugal. Questions the foundations of brazil's division in linguistic areas adopted since the twenties. Another work ("brazil : eldorado's failure?") analyses the principal contemporary brazil's problems attached to its socio-economical history : exportation produce cycles, inner market, revenue sharing, the brazilian economical "miracle", the economics' transnationalization, brazil's international debt, etc

The goal of the present project is to provide a preliminary descriptive analysis of the language found in a short manuscript in the Special Collections of the Georgetown University Library. The manuscript is a five-page Catholic catechism written in an Eastern Algonquian language. It is the only extant record of the language which is presumed to be Piscataway (also called Conoy). The identification of the language is based on the attribution of authorship to Father Andrew White, a seventeenth-century English Jesuit missionary. By providing as much of a description as possible through morphological and phonological analysis of the data, I hope to recover some knowledge about this extinct language and add to the sparse data on Eastern Algonquian languages. Because the goal of the project is to uncover the data in the manuscript, no theoretical viewpoint has been adopted regarding morphological entities or processes.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo descrever a fonologia da língua Hakitía, língua esta de origem românica falada pela comunidade judaicomarroquina no norte do Brasil. A pesquisa objetiva descrever e documentar esse idioma e quais de seus elementos ainda resistem; e assim, compreender o que acontece com uma língua que tem, praticamente, 516 anos de existência. Esta geração é a última que existe em se tratando dos falantes. Faz-se uma breve contextualização histórica da hakitía, voltando-se à sua origem na Espanha, com a expulsão dos judeus, em 1492, pelos reis Isabel de Castela e Fernando de Aragão, suas várias rotas de exílio, dentre elas, o Marrocos, no norte da África, e, a partir daí até Eretz Amazônia. A pesquisa tem como base metodológica pressupostos gerais da linguística estruturalista, no que se refere à sua descrição.
This study aims at describing the phonology of the Hakitia language, a language of Romanic origin, spoken by the Jewish Maroccan community living in the North of Brazil. This research aims at describing and documenting such language and which of its elements still remains, with the purpose of understanding what has occurred with a language that is, virtually, 516 years old. As far as speaking is concerned, this generation of Hakitian speakers is the last one we know about. We present a brief historical background of the Hakitia language since its origin in Spain until the expulsion of the Jews from this country by the kings Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. We examine also their several routes of exile, among which Marrocco in Northern Africa and from there to Amazon Eretz. The methodological underpinnings used to describe this research came from the general assumptions of structural linguistics.

Cette description grammaticale de l’afar s’appuie essentiellement sur des données recueillies sur le terrain auprès de très nombreux locuteurs afarophones, vivant à Djibouti, en Erythrée et en Ethiopie. La richesse des données a permis de prendre en compte les variantes dialectales tout au long de la description. Celle-ci s’organise autour de plusieurs parties : système phonologique et phonétique, système nominal, système verbal, et syntaxe de l’énoncé. Cette étude a permis de mieux évaluer l’originalité de certains traits connus mais aussi de mettre en valeur des traits peu connus voire ignorés jusqu’à présent. Citons entre autres : redéfinition du statut de la rétroflexe ; approfondissement des valeurs sémantiques et syntaxiques attachées aux différents procédés de dérivation nominale et verbale ; illustration du rôle primordial de la relative dans une langue où il n’y a pas de catégorie « adjectif » ; étude détaillée de la polarité de genre et de l’accord du verbe en genre non en nombre (accord au singulier avec un nom marqué comme pluriel) ; distinction entre noms adverbiaux et adverbes sur des critères syntaxiques; mise en valeur de la portée syntaxique et sémantique des quatre postpositions; meilleure définition de la catégorie des idéophones sur le plan morphophonologique, syntaxique et sémantique ; mise en lumière des procédés de topicalisation. En apportant un nouvel éclairage sur l’afar, à l’intérieur du couchitique et de la famille afro-asiatique, cette thèse se veut aussi une contribution à la typologie des langues
This grammatical description of Afar is mostly based on fieldwork data collected from a great number of Afar speakers living in Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The wealth of data has allowed us to embrace dialectal variations in the description. This description has been built around several components: the phonological and phonetic system, the nominal system, the verbal system, and the syntax.This study leads us to better assess the originality of some features that are already known, and also to bring out other features that were not well known or unknown until now: redefinition of the status of retroflex consonants ; enhanced understanding of semantic and syntactic values of different processes of nominal and verbal derivation ; illustration of the crucial role of the relative clause in a language without adjectives ; detailed study of gender polarity and verb agreement in gender – and not in number – (agreement in the singular with a name marked in the plural) ; differentiation between adverbial names and adverbs on the basis of syntactic criteria ; highlight of the syntactic and semantic significance of four postpositions ; better definition of ideophones from the morphophonological, syntactic and semantic aspects ; highlight of topicalization processes. By shedding new light on Afar within the Cushitic and Afro-Asian family, this thesis aims also to contribute to language typolog*y

Ce sujet de recherche propose une description de quelques variétés linguistiques à tradition orale du Piémont occidental italien, selon les approches de la dialectologie perceptuelle et de la géolinguistique descriptive. Les variétés choisies comme objet d’analyse se situent dans la province de Turin, en bordure et au sein même des vallées piémontaises étiquetées comme « valles vaudoises » : Val Cluson et Val Germanasca (Val Saint Martin). L’aire que nous considérons est caractérisée par un contact linguistique marqué par une forte identité culturelle entre les parlers gallo-romans (minorités linguistiques, de type occitan provençal) et italo-romans (de type pédémontans) : ces variétés ne bénéficient pas d’une position paritaire ni d’un point de vue politico-administratif, ni dans la conscience des locuteurs qui entretiennent avec les quatre types linguistiques, i.e. l’italien (régional et moyen), les variétés occitanes et pédémontanes, ainsi que le français, une relation complexe. Nous avons relevé les processus variationnels (phonétiques et lexicaux) qui semblent marquer l’identité linguistique des locuteurs dans cet espace plurilingue, en tenant compte des perspectives, objective et subjective (perception des locuteurs quant à la variation linguistique de l’aire), diachronique et synchronique, dans l’examen des systèmes linguistiques choisis, très peu pris en considération par la littérature dialectologique récente. Cette double perspective permet également de clarifier la trajectoire de processus de changement phonétique qui impactent la restructuration des systèmes de ces vallées
The thesis focuses on a description of four dialectal varieties (gallo-italian and gallo-romance) of the Western Piedmont (Italy) by adopting several linguistic approches, perceptual dialectology's and geolinguistics' ones. The géographical area is caracterized by a linguistic variation and a language contact, marked by a high degree of linguistic identity between gallo-romance (occitan) and gallo-italian (pedemontans) dialects : these varieties do not benefit of the same position by political and social points of view, nor in the awareness of the speakers

This study investigates sociophonetic stress variation in the Onondaga County area of Upstate New York. I argue that five variations of stress correlate to factors of age, education level, place of residence, frequency, and analogical change. Dinkin and Evanini (2010) have examined and discovered similar outcomes of stress variation in his work with dialectal features across the state of New York. Rather than analyze the state and its borders in their entirety, I focus on morpheme-specific analogical change of stress in specific social categories within the Syracuse, New York region. In terms of lexical items, I analyze stress placement within four-, five-, and six-syllable words containing the -mentary affix and explore how stress shifts in these words depending on those social and linguistic factors. Data were collected through formal and informal sociolinguistic interviews in which each instance of the target words were analyzed as belonging to one of five types of stress. Results indicate that Syracuse is one of the locations in the state that see all five stress patterns. To further investigate, I take the provided evidence of stress variation and filter for sociological relevance for factors of age, gender, and residence.

The present study aims to address the question of how vowel quality varies between rural and town-dwelling male speakers of Irish-English in South Roscommon, Ireland. Previous studies have identified four distinct varieties of Irish-English in Ireland: the Eastern, South &Western, Midland, and Northern varieties, loosely based on the political provinces of Munster, Connaught, Leinster, and Ulster. County Roscommon straddles the provinces of Connaught and Leinster, complicating the presence of phonological features associated with one of two different ‘accent regions’. The last phonological study carried out in Roscommon was by Patrick Leo Henry in 1957. While this was a promising start in assessing regional distinctions, rural ones in particular, the lack of recent studies leaves a sizeable gap that does not address modern changes in the linguistic landscape of Ireland, nor the availability of modern methods of acoustic analysis. In particular, the present study investigates the pre-nasal merging of front unrounded vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, vowel centralization, and a lower /æ/, associated with the Western variety of Irish English. Factors such as supraregionalization lead to my hypothesis that rural speakers will demonstrate higher frequency of the vowel features associated with the Western variety. To assess the frequency of certain vowel sounds, twenty participants were recorded and formant data was extracted for F1 and F2 values of the tokens. It was found that the rural speakers in Roscommon demonstrated a more prominent merger between /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, a lower [æ], and the rural speakers demonstrated an overall trend toward centralization.

Cette these comprend un ensemble de recherches sur la phonetique du portugais du bresil. C'est un long travail descriptif presente en trois etapes : un precis qui renferme les regles generales de prononciation portugal-bresil ; une description detaillee de l'ensemble des sons utilises dans le portugais de dix-sept capitales d'etat (sur un total de vingt-trois) au bresil ; et une analyse du probleme complexe de la delimitation des aires linguistiques au bresil, dans le domaine de la phonetique. Ces travaux ne se limitent pas a une norme unique, mais a des exemples reels de la langue orale de toutes les regions bresiliennes, representees par ces capitales d'etat. Cette variete de composantes interregionales permet de cerner les principales caracteristiques du phonetisme bresilien et de mettre en question les criteres adoptes depuis les annees vingt pour la division du bresil en aires linguistiques. Un autre travail ("le bresil : la faillite de l'eldorado?") analyse les principaux problemes du bresil contemporain en egard a sa formation socio-economique : grands cycles de produits d'exportation et leurs consequences, formation d'un marche interne, repartition des revenus, le "miracle" economique bresilien, la transnationalisation de l'economie et les caracteristiques de l'endettement exterieur du bresil
This thesis is made up of a research whole about phonetics on brazil's portuguese. It is a long descriptive work presented in three stages : one precis including general rules of pronunciation ; one detailed description of the whole system of brazil's portuguese sounds in seventeen brazilian states (on txentythree); one analysis on the intricate problem of linguistic areas delimitation in brazil with regard to phonetics. These works exclude a single pattern and are based on examples of oral language as it is really spoken in all brazilian regions. This variety of pronunciations shows the principal peculiarities of brazilian portuguese. It also questions the foundations of brazil's division in linguistic areas adopted since the twenties. Another work (brazil : eldorado's failure?") analyses the principal contemporary brazil's problems attached to its socio-economical history : exportation produce cycles, inner market, revenue sharing, the brazilian economical "miracle", the economics transnationalization, brazil's international debt, etc

Il existe dans le sud ouest algérien plusieurs variétés de berbère. Certaines d'entre elles sont situées dans la région dite du Sud-Oranais et peuvent être cataloguées comme des langues en danger. Nous avons donc entrepris de décrire ces variétés avant qu'elles ne disparaissent. Cela a été mené à bien en réalisant plusieurs enquêtes de terrain. Par ailleurs, ce travail de documentation linguistique et de conservation du patrimoine culturel n'est qu'un des aspects de cette thèse. Ce travail académique est à la croisée de différents domaines disciplinaires. Nous avons eu recours aux méthodes en usage en Sciences de l'Information Géographique (SIG) et en Sciences Des Données (SDD) pour mener une étude dialectologique. Grâce aux SIG, nous avons réalisé une étude géolinguistique qui nous a permis de visualiser sur des cartes linguistiques la distribution de la variation linguistique de certaines consonnes. À partir de ces données, nous avons discuté de la réalité phonologique de ces consonnes simples et géminées. Dans le prolongement, une étude dialectométrique a été effectuée en nous basant sur des méthodes de partitions des données. Nous avons utilisé les méthodes d'Apprentissage Non Supervisé (PHA, k-moyenne, MDS, ...) et les méthodes d'Apprentissage Supervisé (CART) connues en SDD. Les résultats ont été affichés sous la forme de figures (cartes linguistiques, dendogramme, heatmap, arbre, ...) à des fins d'exploration visuelle des données. L'ensemble de ces études a été accompli par le biais d'un traitement informatique (langage R). Puis, nous avons entrepris une analyse phonétique fondée sur une étude acoustique des rhotiques alvéolaires : [ɾ], [r], [ɾˤ] et [rˤ]. Ces unités phoniques se distinguent par leur temporalité et leur réalisation articulatoire. Ainsi, les spectrogrammes nous ont permis d'examiner la distribution de ces sons. Puis, cela nous a aidé à distinguer ce qui relevait de la phonétique et de la phonologie. Ensuite, nous avons achevé cette thèse par une étude phonétique et statistique. Ces dernières ont porté sur l'obstruction réalisée par la pointe de la langue et sur la nature des vocoïdes qui accompagnent les rhotiques alvéolaires dans l'environnement d'une consonne
There are several Berber languages in the south west of Algeria. Some of them are situated in the so-called Sud-Oranais and they can be categorized as endangered languages. So I have decided to describe them before they disappear. That’s why, I have carried out several fieldworks. But, this linguistic documentation work and cultural heritage conservation are just one of aspects of our thesis. This PhD are transdisciplinary. I have used the methods which are applied in Geographic Information Science (GIS) and in Data Science (DS) to carry out a dialectological study. A geolinguistic study has been undertaken and has enabled to visualize the expansion of the linguistic variation of certain consonants through GIS. Based on these data, I have debated the phonological reality of the simple and geminate consonants. From this research, a dialectometric study was carried out on the basis of data partitioning methods. I have used the Unsupervised Learning Methods (HAC, k-mean, MDS, ...) and the Supervised Learning Methods (CART) known in DS. A visual exploration (linguistic maps, dendogram, heatmap, tree, ...) approach is proposed in order to analyse the results which have been realized through computer processing (R language). Then, I have undertaken a phonetic analysis, which is based on an acoustic study of alveolar rhotics : [ɾ], [r], [ɾˤ] and [rˤ]. These phonic unities are distinguished by their temporality and their articulatory realization. Thus, the spectrograms enabled to examine the distribution of these sounds and to distinguish what was related to phonetic and phonology. Then, this thesis with a phonetic and statistical study has reinforced this research focused on the obstruction made by the tip of the tongue and on the nature of the vocoids which goes along with the alveolar rhotic in the area of the consonants

Depuis quelques décennies, de nombreux scientifiques alertent au sujet de la disparition des langues qui ne cesse de s'accélérer.Face au déclin alarmant du patrimoine linguistique mondial, il est urgent d'agir afin de permettre aux linguistes de terrain, a minima, de documenter les langues en leur fournissant des outils de collecte innovants et, si possible, de leur permettre de décrire ces langues grâce au traitement des données assisté par ordinateur.C'est ce que propose ce travail, en se concentrant sur trois axes majeurs du métier de linguiste de terrain : la collecte, la transcription et l'analyse.Les enregistrements audio sont primordiaux, puisqu'ils constituent le matériau source, le point de départ du travail de description. De plus, tel un instantané, ils représentent un objet précieux pour la documentation de la langue. Cependant, les outils actuels d'enregistrement n'offrent pas au linguiste la possibilité d'être efficace dans son travail et l'ensemble des appareils qu'il doit utiliser (enregistreur, ordinateur, microphone, etc.) peut devenir encombrant.Ainsi, nous avons développé LIG-AIKUMA, une application mobile de collecte de parole innovante, qui permet d'effectuer des enregistrements directement exploitables par les moteurs de reconnaissance automatique de la parole (RAP). Les fonctionnalités implémentées permettent d'enregistrer différents types de discours (parole spontanée, parole élicitée, parole lue) et de partager les enregistrements avec les locuteurs. L'application permet, en outre, la construction de corpus alignés << parole source (peu dotée)-parole cible (bien dotée) >>, << parole-image >>, << parole-vidéo >> qui présentent un intérêt fort pour les technologies de la parole, notamment pour l'apprentissage non supervisé.Bien que la collecte ait été menée de façon efficace, l'exploitation (de la transcription jusqu'à la glose, en passant par la traduction) de la totalité de ces enregistrements est impossible, tant la tâche est fastidieuse et chronophage.Afin de compléter l'aide apportée aux linguistes, nous proposons d'utiliser des techniques de traitement automatique de la langue pour lui permettre de tirer partie de la totalité de ses données collectées. Parmi celles-ci, la RAP peut être utilisée pour produire des transcriptions, d'une qualité satisfaisante, de ses enregistrements.Une fois les transcriptions obtenues, le linguiste peut s'adonner à l'analyse de ses données. Afin qu'il puisse procéder à l'étude de l'ensemble de ses corpus, nous considérons l'usage des méthodes d'alignement forcé. Nous démontrons que de telles techniques peuvent conduire à des analyses linguistiques fines. En retour, nous montrons que la modélisation de ces observations peut mener à des améliorations des systèmes de RAP
In the last few decades, many scientists were concerned with the fast extinction of languages. Faced with this alarming decline of the world's linguistic heritage, action is urgently needed to enable fieldwork linguists, at least, to document languages by providing them innovative collection tools and to enable them to describe these languages. Machine assistance might be interesting to help them in such a task.This is what we propose in this work, focusing on three pillars of the linguistic fieldwork: collection, transcription and analysis.Recordings are essential, since they are the source material, the starting point of the descriptive work. Speech recording is also a valuable object for the documentation of the language.The growing proliferation of smartphones and other interactive voice mobile devices offer new opportunities for fieldwork linguists and researchers in language documentation. Field recordings should also include ethnolinguistic material which is particularly valuable to document traditions and way of living. However, large data collections require well organized repositories to access the content, with efficient file naming and metadata conventions.Thus, we have developed LIG-AIKUMA, a free Android app running on various mobile phones and tablets. The app aims to record speech for language documentation, over an innovative way.It includes a smart generation and handling of speaker metadata as well as respeaking and parallel audio data mapping.LIG-AIKUMA proposes a range of different speech collection modes (recording, respeaking, translation and elicitation) and offers the possibility to share recordings between users. Through these modes, parallel corpora are built such as "under-resourced speech - well-resourced speech", "speech - image", "speech - video", which are also of a great interest for speech technologies, especially for unsupervised learning.After the data collection step, the fieldwork linguist transcribes these data. Nonetheless, it can not be done -currently- on the whole collection, since the task is tedious and time-consuming.We propose to use automatic techniques to help the fieldwork linguist to take advantage of all his speech collection. Along these lines, automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a way to produce transcripts of the recordings, with a decent quality.Once the transcripts are obtained (and corrected), the linguist can analyze his data. In order to analyze the whole collection collected, we consider the use of forced alignment methods. We demonstrate that such techniques can lead to fine evaluation of linguistic features. In return, we show that modeling specific features may lead to improvements of the ASR systems

This thesis presents an acoustic vowel space analysis of F1 and F2 frequencies from 10 speakers of Pijal Media Lengua (PML) and 10 speakers of Imbabura Quichua (IQ). This thesis also provides a brief grammatical discription of PML with insights into contrasts and similarities between Spanish, Quichua and other documented varieties of Media Lengua (ML). ML is typically described as a mixed language with a Quichua morphosyntactic structure where almost all content words are replaced by their Spanish-derived counterparts through the process of relexification. I use mixed effects models to test for statistical significance between PML Spanish-derived vowels and Quichua-derived vowels. The results provide suggestive data for (1) co-existing vowel systems in moderate contact situations and (2) moderate evidence for co-exsiting vowel systems in extreme contact situations. Results also show that PML may be manipulating as many as eight vowels and IQ as many as six.

Stops are one of the most common sounds across languages of the world. Among these pervasive sounds, ejectives form a unique group that is distinguishable from other types of stops. Their particular mechanism of articulation, such as larynx raising and unusually high oral pressure, separates them from the others. More interestingly, a listener perceives them differently and makes a distinction from non-ejective, or pulmonic, stops. What is it that we perceive when hearing ejectives? Do we perceive certain acoustic cues or auditory qualities that are part of their distinctive phonetic nature? Are these phonetic characteristics always distinctive? In other words, is our perception of the ejectives always consistent without any variation at the phonetic level? Motivated by these questions and from my recent exposure to Tsilhqut’in ejectives, I set out to pursue a phonetic investigation of these intriguing sounds. The present study is composed of two main analyses. One is an acoustic analysis that instrumentally examines a dataset of ejective and non-ejective stops in the Tsilhqut’in language with respect to acoustic dimensions such as Voice Onset Time (VOT) in order to compare all the stop classes in terms of their acoustic properties. Such a comparison helps to phonetically characterize the ejectives within the language. The acoustic measures also enable us to compare the characteristics of Tsilhqut’in ejectives with those in other languages, based on previously reported acoustic correlates. In order to determine the characteristics of ejectives across languages, Tsilhqut’in ejectives were compared with ejectives in different languages (e.g., Inguish). The other analysis is auditory, whereby I have examined how I perceived a subset of the ejectives taken out of the whole dataset and compared my auditory judgments with the acoustic measurements in order to find any correlation between results from the two analyses. The findings of the study indicate that Tsilhqut’in ejectives do not follow a traditional binary typology of ejectives. That is, they are neither strong nor weak, as is often claimed in the literature. They are congruent with what recent studies (e.g., Warner 1996) have found of ejectives in other languages – phonetic variability. This means that the dichotomy cannot account for the variability in ejectives at the phonetic level and that an optimal way of classifying ejectives across languages still awaits discovery. To the best of my knowledge, no other phonetic study has been conducted on Tsilhqut’in ejectives prior to the current study. Moreover, there has been little research or documentation carried out on any other phonetic aspects or sounds of this Athabaskan language. I expect that this instrumental study will contribute to the field of linguistics by adding new phonetic knowledge about such a rarely studied language, and I also expect the present study to play a role in the understanding of language learning and of language revitalization around the world.

Previous research on Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the extreme northeast of India, has found it to have three lexical tones. However, the few phonological studies of Sumi have focused mainly on its segmental phonology and have failed to provide any substantial account of the tone system. This thesis addresses the issue by providing the first comprehensive description of tone in this language. In addition to confirming three contrastive tones, this study also presents the first acoustic phonetic analysis of Sumi, looking at the phonetic realisation of these tones and the effects of segmental perturbations on tone realisation. The first autosegmental representation of Sumi tone is offered, allowing us to account for tonal phenomena such as the assignment of surface tones to prefixes that appear to be lexically unspecified for tone. Finally, this investigation presents the first account of morphologically conditioned tone variation in Sumi, finding regular paradigmatic shifts in the tone on verb roots that undergo nominalisation.
The thesis also offers a cross-linguistic comparison of the tone system of Sumi with that of other closely related Kuki-Chin-Naga languages and some preliminary observations of the historical origin and development of tone in these languages are made. This is accompanied by a typological comparison of these languages with other Tibeto-Burman languages, which shows that although these languages are spoken in what has been termed the ‘Indosphere’, their tone systems are similar to those of languages spoken further to the east in the ‘Sinosphere’. Finally, a more global typological comparison of Sumi with ‘African’ and ‘East Asian’ tone languages demonstrates that Sumi displays features typically associated with both these language ‘types’. This finding suggests the need to re-evaluate this traditional dichotomy of tone systems, and the need to consider morphological structure in typologies of tone.

This thesis deals with the description of the human voice from the forensic phonetic perspective. At the beginning of the theoretical part, some important cases from the history of this field are mentioned, as well as the attitude of judges to the voice as evidence.The main tasks of forensic phonetics are then briefly presented. The remainder of the theoretical part is devoted to summarizing the existing knowledge from the field of audiovisual perception and comparison of voice description and face description, including several concrete examples of systematic approaches to obtaining these descriptions, both for professional purposes and for the needs of investigators in practise. The aim of the practical part is to compare the initial uninstructed, naive description of the voice of selected speakers, obtained from the respondents in a simulated police questioning, followed by an instructed systematic description according to the interrogation protocol, which uses the layman's formulation of the individual questions instead of the original phonetic terminology, and illustrative sound samples to make it easier for the respondents to understand the protocol and to give a more detailed account of the heard voice. The first part of the results analysis is devoted primarily to the naive testimony of the...