{"id":64410,"date":"2024-06-06T05:35:50","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=64410"},"modified":"2024-06-06T05:35:50","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:35:50","slug":"xkcd-fluid-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=64410","title":{"rendered":"xkcd: Fluid Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today's xkcd<\/a> is (or should be)\u00a0 the illustration for a week or two in every introductory course on the sound side of language:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Mouseover text:<\/strong> \"Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.\"
\n<\/p>\n

Randall Munroe probably already knows that \"murmuring example phrases to yourself\", though a useful exercise, is an imperfect approximation to the kinds of reductions that routinely happen in the fluent transformation from (phonological) symbols to (articulatory and acoustic) signals…<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, a plurality of linguists (and the vast majority of psycholinguists) share (at least in their published work) the false belief that an accurate understanding of speech production and perception can be found by using recordings of subjects reading lists of de-contextualized sentences in a laboratory setting. (Though even there, speakers venture far from dictionary pronunciation fields…) Sociolinguists have of course championed the idea that you need to learn from patterns across a variety of speech styles and genres, including especially informal conversation — but the penetration of that idea across sub-disciplines has been surprisingly weak.<\/p>\n

Here are a few posts where we've taken up adjacent topics:<\/p>\n

\"I'ma<\/a>\", 7\/3\/2005
\n\"I'monna<\/a>\", 7\/3\/2005
\n\"'On' time<\/a>\", 8\/4\/2005
\n\"Finna and tryna<\/a>\", 8\/5\/2005
\n\"I'ma stay with the youngsters<\/a>\", 5\/14\/2010
\n\"The history of 'gonna'<\/a>\", 9\/10\/2010
\n\"Ask Language Log: Writing 'gonna' or 'going to'<\/a>\", 6\/25\/2011
\n\"Ima<\/a>\", 1\/11\/2012
\n\"Gonna, gone, onna, a — on?<\/a>\", 8\/10\/2012
\n\"Ask Language Log: 'Finna'<\/a>\", 11\/4\/2016
\n\"From inflection to reduction<\/a>\", 1\/10\/2018
\n\"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet<\/a>\", 4\/19\/2018
\n\"Farther on beyond the IPA<\/a>\", 1\/18\/2020
\n\"First novels<\/a>\", 3\/13\/2022
\n\"Pronunciation evolution<\/a>\", 4\/15\/2022
\n\"More post-IPA astronauts<\/a>\", 4\/16\/2022<\/p>\n

For larger-scale discussions of (some of) the basic issues, see e.g. David Stampe's 1973 \"A Dissertation on Natural Phonology<\/a>\"; Keith Johnson's 2004 paper \"Massive reduction in conversational American English<\/a>\"; or my 2018 chapter \"Towards Progress in Theories of Language Sound Structure<\/a>\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today's xkcd is (or should be)\u00a0 the illustration for a week or two in every introductory course on the sound side of language: Mouseover text: \"Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics-in-the-funny-papers","category-phonetics-and-phonology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64410"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64420,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64410\/revisions\/64420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}