Abstract
The goals of documenting and describing languages, whether endangered or widely used, are far-ranging, from preserving the inherited wisdom of the language community to understanding the spectrum of structures and communication events the human mind is capable of dealing with. Part of this spectrum covers the relation of language to other forms of communication, and one property of this subspectrum is the specific rhythm patterns of speech which characterises a language community, along with other regular events in daily life and in culture, such as walking and running, dance and music. The analysis of speech rhythm is placed in a broader semiotic and analytic context than is customary in ‘mainstream’ linguistics. Two phonetic approaches are discussed in detail, the signal processing spectral analysis method and the annotation based isochrony heuristic method, and the associated procedures are applied to Ibibio (New Benue-Congo) data with the intention of complementing existing studies of Ibibio grammar and phonology. The main emphasis is on rhythm analysis within Modulation Theory. Modulation Theory is a signal processing paradigm, and within this framework Rhythm Formant Theory and its associated Rhythm Formant Analysis (RFA) method are introduced. The modulation theoretic approach contrasts methodologically with the second approach, the irregularity or isochrony heuristic, for deriving an irregularity or variability index of relative isochrony (equal timing) from the timestamps of speech annotations. Results derived from both approaches for the Ibibio data show that rhythm types are not static numbers or patterns which are valid for entire languages, but vary dynamically over time during utterances and between utterances in a corpus. Based on these results, a hierarchical clustering procedure was applied in order to investigate the typological status of Ibibio. The study is designed to be exploratory, with the goal of providing a theoretical basis for future more detailed quantitative studies of the rhythms of Ibibio and its neighbouring languages, and their relation to other languages in Nigeria and beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
Python code and data will be available on GitHub from publication time: https://github.com/dafyddg/RFA.
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge the essential contribution of Prof. Eno-Abasi Essien Urua of the University of Uyo to the present study. Eno and her publications not only introduced me to the intricacies of tone patterning and tone assignment in Ibibio and related Lower Cross languages, but also to her efficient style of fieldwork and to her network of colleagues and associates in Nigeria, from whom I was able to learn about many features of Nigerian languages and regional cultures. Furthermore, the Ibibio data for this study are recordings of her voice.
I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Moses Effiong Ekpenyong, whose cooperation with Eno, his dissertation applying quantitative information technology methods to Ibibio tone and his work on text-to-speech systems for Ibibio has been a source of encouragement in my own applications of computational linguistic and phonetic methods to Ibibio. Thanks also to Prof. Ulrike Gut for reintroducing me to the study of rhythm and for partnering a number of fruitful research projects, including education and fieldwork research at the University of Uyo, to Mfọn Udọinyang and Okokon Akpan, who kindly helped with the Ibibio data, and to Peng Li and Xuewei Lin (Guangzhou) who kindly helped with the Chinese data.
Acknowledgement for support of travel between Nigeria and Germany is due to the DAAD, and for the vision of Roger Tucker and Ksenia Shalonova of the Local Language Speech Technology Initiative (LLSTI) for applications of speech technology to languages in Africa and Asia.
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Gibbon, D. (2022). New Perspectives on Ibibio Speech Rhythm. In: Ekpenyong, M.E., Udoh, I.I. (eds) Current Issues in Descriptive Linguistics and Digital Humanities. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2932-8_34
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