Sidney Wood (phonetician)

Sidney Wood is a British-born retired Swedish phonetician and Research Fellow (docent).

Sidney Wood
Born (1934-04-12) 12 April 1934 (age 90)
Isle of Sheppey, UK
NationalitySwedish
OccupationPhonetician

Research edit

Wood’s research, based on X-ray motion films of speech (Regional Southern British English, South Swedish, Bulgarian, Colloquial Cairo Arabic, West Greenlandic Inuit) and vocal tract modelling, is widely cited.[1][2] It is devoted to the following topics:

His most significant findings are:

More recently, his research focus turned towards British regional pronunciations, especially southeastern accents of Southern British English (SBE), [15] including sound change in Received Pronunciation.[16] Wood has been involved in a significant theoretical controversy[17][18][19] concerning the validity of the Bell vowel model and the legitimacy of using X-ray films to contradict it. He argued that critical functions of the model are contradicted by empirical data and by acoustical theory. Catford's 1981 paper contains detailed discussion of Wood's arguments, and a partial defence of the classical vowel description that Wood's research calls into question.[20] In his critical analysis of phonetic theory, John Laver notes "Because it is so widespread, a version of the traditional method will be described here; but Ladefoged (1980) and Wood (1977, 1979) have proposed descriptions of tongue action which though less well known are more explanatory and less ambiguous, which are recommended to the reader who wishes to follow the matter further".[21] Clark and Yallop write "There is no principled reason why the location of maximum tongue height should correspond directly and systematically to vowel quality (Lindau 1978, Wood 1979).[22] Hayward summarizes Wood's theoretical position, concluding "In Wood's view, constriction location and constriction degree should also form the basis for the phonological specification of vowels. His ideas have proved attractive to some phonologists."[23]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ "Profile Sidney Wood".
  2. ^ "Sidney Wood".
  3. ^ Wood, Sidney (1982). "X-ray and model studies of vowel articulation". Working Papers of Lund University. 23.
  4. ^ Wood, Sidney (1979). "A radiographic analysis of constriction locations for vowels". Journal of Phonetics. 7: 25–43. doi:10.1016/S0095-4470(19)31031-9.
  5. ^ Wood, Sidney (1986). "The acoustical significance of tongue, lip and larynx maneuvers in rounded palatal vowels". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 80 (2): 391–401. Bibcode:1986ASAJ...80..391W. doi:10.1121/1.394090. PMID 3745671.
  6. ^ Pettersson, T; Wood, S (1987). "Vowel reduction in Bulgarian and its implications for theories of vowel production". Folia Linguistica. 21: 261–279. doi:10.1515/flin.1987.21.2-4.261. S2CID 145562626.
  7. ^ Wood, S; Pettersson, T (1987). "Model experiments on vowel reduction in Bulgarian". Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Tallinn. 2: 57–60.
  8. ^ Wood, S; Pettersson, T (1988). "Vowel reduction in Bulgarian; phonetic data and model experiments". Folia Linguistica. 22 (3–4): 239–262. doi:10.1515/flin.1988.22.3-4.239. S2CID 144986771.
  9. ^ Wood, Sidney (1996). "Assimilation or coarticulation? Evidence from the coordination of tongue gestures for the palatalization of Bulgarian alveolar stops". Journal of Phonetics. 24: 139–164. doi:10.1006/jpho.1996.0009.
  10. ^ Wood, Sidney (1991). "Vertical, monovocalic and other impossible vowel systems: a review of the articulation of the Kabardian vowels". Studia Linguistica. 45 (1–2): 49–70. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9582.1991.tb00815.x.
  11. ^ a b Wood, Sidney (1997). "A cinefluorographic study of the temporal organization of articulator gestures: Examples from Greenlandic". Speech Communication. 22 (2–3): 207–225. doi:10.1016/S0167-6393(97)00024-1.
  12. ^ a b Wood, Sidney (1997). "The gestural organization of vowels and consonants: a cineradiographic study of articulator gestures in Greenlandic". Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. 1. Patras, Rhodes: 387–388.
  13. ^ a b Wood, Sidney (1991). "X-ray data on the temporal coordination of speech gestures". Journal of Phonetics. 19 (3–4): 281–292. doi:10.1016/S0095-4470(19)30345-6.
  14. ^ Wood; Sidney (2004). "A cinefluorographic study of uvular consonants in Swedish and West Greenlandic". In Slitka, J; Manuel, S; Matthies, M (eds.). From Sound to Sense: 50+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication. Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT (CD ROM).,
  15. ^ Wood, Sidney (2017). Tsudzuki, Masaki; Taniguchi, Masaki (eds.). "A spectrographic study of sound changes in nineteenth century Kent". Journal of the English Phonetic Society of Japan. 21. A Festschrift for Jack Windsor Lewis on the occasion of his 90th Birthday: 215–246.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  16. ^ Wood, Sidney (10 March 2023). "Dating the open /æ/ sound change in Southern British English". JASA Express Letters. 3 (35205). doi:10.1121/10.0015281. Retrieved 26 April 2023.
  17. ^ Fischer-Jørgensen, E. (1983). Vowel features and their explanatory power in phonology. Abstract for the Tenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Utrecht, 1983.Symposium 5: Phonetic Explanations in Phonology, s. 259-65.
  18. ^ Fischer-Jørgensen, E (1985). "Some basic vowel features, their articulatory correlates, and their explanatory power in phonology". In Fromkin, V (ed.). Phonetic Linguistics. Academic Press, Orlando. pp. 79–99.
  19. ^ Wood, Sidney (1987). "The history of the classical vowel articulation model: a reply to Catford and Fischer-Jørgensen". Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Tallinn: Academy of Sciences. pp. 53–56.
  20. ^ Catford, J. C. (1981). "Observations on the recent history of vowel classification". In Asher, R. E.; Henderson, J.A. (eds.). Towards a History of Phonetics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. pp. 19–32.
  21. ^ Laver, John (1994). Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge University Press. p. 272. ISBN 0-521-45655-X.
  22. ^ Clark, John (1995). An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (2nd ed.). Blackwell. pp. 25–6.
  23. ^ Hayward, Katrina (2000). Experimental Phonetics. Longman. p. 251. ISBN 0-582-29137-2.

External links edit