Book description
The Sounds of Language is an introductory guide to the
linguistic study of speech sounds, which provides uniquely balanced
coverage of both phonology and phonetics.
- Features exercises and problem sets, as well as supporting online
resources at www. wiley.
com/go/zsiga, including additional discussion questions and
exercises, as well as links to further resources such as sound
files, video files, and useful websites
- Creates opportunities for students to practice data analysis and
hypothesis testing
- Integrates data on sociolinguistic variation, first language
acquisition, and second language learning
- Explores diverse topics ranging from the practical, such as how to
make good digital recordings, make a palatogram, solve a
phoneme/allophone problem, or read a spectrogram; to the
theoretical, including the role of markedness in linguistic theory,
the necessity of abstraction, features and formal notation, issues
in speech perception as distinct from hearing, and modelling
sociolinguistic and other variations
- Organized specifically to fit the needs of undergraduate students
of phonetics and phonology, and is structured in a way which enables
instructors to use the text both for a single semester phonetics and
phonology course or for a two-course sequence
Elizabeth C. Zsiga is Professor in the Department of
Linguistics at Georgetown University, where she has been a faculty
member since 1994, teaching phonology and phonetics to both graduate
and undergraduate students, with concentrations in theoretical,
applied, and socio-linguistics. She has been published in numerous
linguistics journals and books. Her research describes the sound
systems of diverse languages including English, Igbo, Korean, Russian,
Setswana, Serbian, and Thai.
