At the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences held in Aix-en-Provence (19–24 August 1991), Professor Peter Ladefoged was presented with a Gold Medal, jointly offered by the International Organizing Committee of the Congress, the International Phonetic Association, and the International Society of Phonetic Sciences, in recognition of his contribution to the subject of phonetics over the forty years of his career to date. Professor Mario Rossi, as the President of the International Organizing Committee of the Congress, asked me to say a few words at the banquet in Peter Ladefoged's honor. This article is intended to give an expanded version of those comments a more permanent form, and to bring an appreciation of his outstanding contribution to a wider audience.

The results of a spectrographic study of the Kabardian vowel system confirm reports in the literature that phonetic vowel quality in Kabardian is determined by the preceding consonant. The data further show that there are three distinct phonetic categories along the F1 axis in the vowel space, and that the contextually determined variation in vowel coloring generally respects this division. Durationally, a correspondence was found between vowel height and duration. While the durational differences were found to be comparable to those reported in languages with contrastive vowel length, the differences were interpreted as a phonetic strategy to enhance the perceptual salience of the vertical vowel system.

It is generally accepted in the descriptive phonetic literature that most variations in pulmonic pressure observed during the production of speeech are passive reactions to changing glottal and supra-glottal resistance (Ladefoged 1968, Ohala et al. 1979, Rothenberg 1968). Active short-term positive changes in lung volume are only found with heavily stressed syllables (Ladefoged 1968, Ohala et al. 1979 ), and in rare cases with with particular consonants such as LuGanda geminates (Ladefoged 1971), Korean fortis stops (but see Rothenberg 1968) and possibly with certain Jingpho segments (Ladefoged 1968). It is assumed therefore that pulmonic speech sounds are normally produced against a constant mean background pressure by movement of air that occurs with decreasing volume of the lungs (Ladefoged 1967, 1968) and with constant respiratory muscle innervation (Rothenberg 1968). The two reported exceptions to this are the pulmonic suction [1] found in the ritual language Damin (Catford 1977) and the recently reported two ingressive fricatives in an ideolect of a Tsou dialect (an Austronesian language) (Fuller 1990). In all other cases, pulmonic initiation is pressure.

Yes-no questions, when unmarked morphologically and syntactically, are marked intonationally. The intonation of this kind of question is generally characterized either by a terminal rise or a higher overall fundamental frequency (F0). Ultan (1978) found that 38 of a sample of 53 languages use the first pattern, and 18 the second. Even in tone languages, these two patterns are not unusual. For example, yes-no questions in Hausa have a final jump to an extra high level regardless of the nature of the final tones (Miller & Tench 1980); in Mandarin both the top line and the bottom line delimiting the pitch range are raised in question intonation (Shen 1990). However, the existence of a downward intonation as an alternative, for instance in English (Bolinger 1989) and French (Fonagy & Berard 1973) has been reported. Although a number of languages have been shown to have a fall for this kind of question, it remains uncertain just how the property of being a question is conveyed. This paper attempts to investigate this issue through an acoustical analysis and a perceptual test of Changsha Chinese, a 6-tone Chinese dialect of the Xiang group, spoken in Hunan. This dialect is selected, because (1) no tone sandhi occurs in this dialect, facilitating the interpretation of the F0 contours in the acoustical analysis; and (2) no empirical study of F0 in this dialect has been previously conducted. While the majority of empirical works on intonation use data collected from read speech, this study undertakes the exploration of natural speech.

The spectrogram in the previous issue of the Journal was of the phrase “It's good to make a guess.” A number of readers interpreted the last four words correctly, but only a few managed to work out the whole sentence. This issue is concerned with a different kind of phonetic data.

Until recently, phoneticians have not spent a great deal of time analyzing waveforms; but the advent of computer systems that make it easy for personal computers of all kinds to record and display sounds has led to this becoming a more common practice. Several aspects of sounds are clearly distinguishable from the waveforms of a phrase. Stop closures are very evident, as are differences between voiced sounds which have repetitive waveforms and voiceless sounds which do not. Differences in amplitude can be used to distinguish high frequency, high intensity sibilants from lower intensity non-sibilant fricatives; and nasals and laterals usually have smaller amplitudes than the louder adjacent vowels. An expanded view of the waveform allows us to see intervals between peaks in the damped wave of a voiced sound, and thus to calculate the frequency of the first formant. Nasals can often be distinguished from vowels in these expanded waveforms, not only by their smaller amplitudes but also by the less clear formant structure.

Esling (1990) reports on the computer coding of the IPA as amended to 1989. The coding system consists of three-digit numbers, divided into groups for consonants, vowels, and diacritics by the first digit. The set of coding numbers in the series 6nn was reserved for the symbols for voice quality and pathological speech listed in the Extensions to the IPA drawn up by the Group working on these symbols at the Kiel IPA Convention.

It is painful to admit neglectfulness, but I see no way around it in the following case. And better late than never. I was inattentive as I sent in my vote of approval to the outcome of the IPA 1989 Kiel Convention.

The two notes in JIPA 20(2) by Kohler (1990) and Ladefoged (1990) concerning the phonemic status of present-day Standard German ç] and [x] are one of many pieces of evidence that distributional (‘taxonomic’) phonemics has happily survived the thirty-year war with Generative Phonology and its offspring. But it is common knowledge among linguists that even half a century after Bloch's (1948) classic paper there is still no fixed and exhaustive set of postulates for phonemic analysis. Such questions as partial overlapping or neutralization or—especially important—‘grammatical prerequisites’ (Pike 1947, 1952) are still open issues, and it is quite probable that, at least for the last-named problem, there is no single, universal solution. In fact, it may very well be that languages differ inherently in this respect, and that for some of them the decision cannot be made in categorial terms. In nonextreme cases there may be at least two different solutions, each valid within its respective framework, one based on the assumption of the analytical primacy of grammatical (or part-grammatical) analysis, and the other on the reverse assumption of pure phonetic distribution. But even with juşt one of these alternatives, one given phonetic-environmental description may lead to a number of different solutions, as exemplified with particular conspicuity by Łobacz (1973). Admitting the alternative of primacy of morphemic analysis vs. pure phonetic distribution, she demonstrated that 504 (sic) different phonemic interpretations of one kind of Standard Polish are possible.

In the IPA 1989 Kiel Convention it was decided to include the voiced epiglottal plosive in the IPA chart in the ‘Other symbols’ section (IPA 1989: 69). Accordingly [ʡ] “voiced epiglottal plosive” appears in the published chart in the middle page of the same issue under ‘Other symbols’. I claim that a “voiced epiglottal plosive” is an ‘impossible’ sound.

The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Hong Kong. The recording is that of a 22-year-old female university student who has lived all her life in Hong Kong.