The questions in this homework are in conjunction with the assignment to read Chapter 2 of Ladefoged (2005) on "Pitch and Loudness".
Your answers are due in class on Wednesday, October 3, for discussion in class that day.
Do the assigned reading described in the first section of this document and then type your answers on a single sheet of paper to bring to class with you to turn in. You may want to make a second copy of this sheet of paper, to take notes as we go over the answers.
In Chapter 1 Ladefoged talked about representing the consonant and vowel
sounds of a language in three ways: (1) in terms of symbols for consonant and vowel
categories that differentiate words (such as m versus k in
me versus key in English),
(2) in terms of the articulations that make the sounds, and (3) in terms of
the acoustic patterns.
He uses analoguous ways to (1) and (3) to represent the pitch patterns
of words in languages such as Cantonese.
(a) Which figure or table shows the symbols
for the word-differentiating pitch patterns in Cantonese?
(b) Which figure or table illustrates the acoustic patterns for
the word-differentiating pitch patterns in Cantonese?
(c) When a language uses pitch patterns to differentiate words in
this way, what are such differentiating pitch patterns called? That is,
what is the word analogous to consonant or vowel?
In another passage in this chapter, Ladefoged talks about another use
of pitch (and something else) to differentiate pairs of sentences such as:
(Pair 1) When danger threatens your children, call the police. versus
When danger threatens, your children call the police.
(Pair 2) Jenny gave Peter instructions to follow. versus.
Jenny gave Peter instructions to follow.
(a) What is this kind of use of pitch in differentiating sentences called?
(b) What is the other aspect of the sentence pattern besides pitch
that differentiates these pair?
In Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1, Ladefoged puts two arrows to mark off a section of the waveform that is repeated 4 times in 0.04 seconds, which corresponds to 100 times in one second. What is the relationship between these numbers and the units for the numbers on the y-axes of Figures 2.1-2.13 in Chapter 2?