Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice

Book excerpt: Phonetic transcription is a key element in many kinds of written works, not least linguistics books, dictionaries, language-teaching texts and bilingual reference works. This book is the first book-length scholarly monograph to address all of the important aspects of phonetic transcription.The aim of phonetic transcription is to represent the sounds of speech on paper. This book reviews contemporary uses of phonetic transcription in dictionaries, language teaching texts, phonetic and phonological studies, dialectology and sociolinguistics, speech pathology and therapy, and forensic phonetics. Heselwood surveys the history of attempts to represent speech, considering the relationship of transcription to written language. The book also includes a thorough analysis of the many different kinds of phonetic transcription - broad, narrow, auditory, systematic, segmental, suprasegmental, parametric and others - addressing what exactly is represented in different kinds and levels of transcription.Different ways in which transcription can be used alongside modern instrumental records of speech are illustrated with the claim that transcription embodies a kind of knowledge about speech unavailable to instruments - knowledge gained from the experience of listening to it in a phonetically informed manner. The author grounds this claim in the philosophy of phenomenalism, countering arguments against auditory transcription that have been advanced by experimental phoneticians for reasons of empirical inadequacy, and by linguistic rationalists who say it is irrelevant for understanding the supposedly innate categories that are said to underlie speech. A glossary of terms is included, along with a series of examples to demonstrate the comparison, classification and interpretation of phonetic transcriptions for different purposes.