Field Project Report 4 for Ling 600.01 Phonetic Theory
Report due by the beginning of class on Tuesday of Week 9.
This report on "Obstruents -- Preliminary List" should be about three or (at most) four single-spaced pages, exclusive of references and appendices.
Part 1: Consonant chart table. Make a table that is organized along the lines of a traditional consonant chart, with columns for contrasts along the dimension of "place of (primary) articulation" and rows for contrasts along the dimension of "manner of (primary) articulation" -- including, eventually, a second split of rows into subrows for consonants made with the same manner of articulation, but contrasting phonation type. (You do not have to have an analysis of the phonation types yet.) As in the traditional table, the rows should be arranged with least sonorant (i.e., voiceless stops) at the top and most sonorant (i.e., central approximants a.k.a. "semivowels") at the bottom. Also, the columns should be arranged with most anterior (i.e., labial) constrictions at the left and most posterior (i.e., pharyngeal or glottal) at the right. Fill in as many cells of the table as you can with transcribed wordforms (and glosses) exemplifying the consonants in contrast, so that the reader can see at a glance the justification for your claims about the consonant inventory. At this stage, focus particularly on getting all of the cells for contrasting manners and places for obstruents (stops, affricates, fricatives) filled in.
Part 2: Acoustic analysis. Get good clean recordings of the language consultant producing the words in the rows for the obstruents in your table. Choose the three or four contrasts in manner and/or place that you found most difficult to decipher and collate the information you got from doing in-class labs no. 7 and 8. Make three or four relevant figures (annotated spectrograms and/or spectra taken from relevant intervals) to support your conclusions about the most appropriate descriptions of these contrasting manners and/or places. Provide an appropriate figure caption for each figure, explaining what the figure is about.
Part 3: Appendices -- optional. If your figure captions in Part 2 answer all of the questions that you raised for yourself in the two in-class labs associated with this report (Labs 7 and 8), you can just say this in the figure captions and not append a redundant repetition of the questions and answers as stand-alone "final reports" on the two labs.