The dissertation is a basic description of segmental phonology, tone, and the functions of tone in the San Juan Quiahije (SJQ) variety of Eastern Chatino. Chatino languages are spoken in the southern part of Oaxaca, Mexico. Chatino languages form a subgroup that is coordinate with the Zapotec languages in the Zapotecan family of the Otomanguean linguistic stock. The dissertation focuses on the sound system of SJQ Chatino, its system of tones, and the lexical, morphological, and syntactic functions of the tone system. SJQ Chatino is of special interest because it is a Chatino variety that has reduced nearly all historic simple stems to monosyllables, leaving behind complex consonant clusters; it has an exceptionally large tone system and complex system of tonal sandhi; the tones mark significant grammatical contrasts in addition to lexical units; and tone sandhi is significant in cuing syntactic and discourse structure. This description starts with an introduction to the language, its language family, a typological overview, a brief history of my fieldwork, and the methodology undertaken in this study. The work then describes the segmental phonology, including syllable structure and the distribution of the consonant and vowel phonemes, and the tones and tone sandhi, arguing for a system of fourteen contrastive tones at the lexical level. The work then turns to the functions of tone, including the restrictions on the lexical tone system according to the part of speech, with special emphasis on numeral words; the use of tone in marking possessor person and number in inalienably possessed nouns, and in marking aspect and subject person and number in verb; and tone in Spanish loan words. The description and analysis of these aspects of Quiahije Chatino is based on data gathered through elicitation and oral texts as well as my own intuitions as a native speaker of SJQ Chatino. / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Not available / text

published_or_final_version / toc / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Science in Audiology

A central claim of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993a) is that phonological variation can be modeled through the variable ranking of universal constraints. In this thesis, I test this claim by examining variation in the tongue root vowel harmony system in a number of closely related yet distinct Bantu languages of Congo and Zaire. The twenty-odd languages are drawn from each of Guthrie 1967's eight Bantu C. subgroups and are shown to vary along a number of dimensions. One is morphological, related to whether or not the harmonic element in the lexical root extends to prefixes and suffixes. This variation is shown to follow from the variable ranking of constraints that seek to ALIGN the harmonic feature, [retracted tongue root] ([rtr]) with the edges of the morphological domains STEM and WORD. A second parameter of variation concerns the relationship between high vowels and [rtr]. A third dimension involves the interaction of [rtr] with the low vowel [a] under harmony. Here, three patterns involving (i) low vowel assimilation, (ii) low vowel opacity, or (iii) low vowel transparency under harmony are shown to follow from the variable ranking of a few constraints. A significant theme that emereges in the study is recognizing and characterizing the distinct morphological and phonological domain edges involved in vowel harmony. An important contribution of this study is in bringing to light a language family where phonological tongue height, in this case expressed by the feature [low], is shown to be incompatible with tongue root retraction, as expressed in the feature [rtr]. Although the gestures of tongue body lowering and tongue root retraction are sympathetic in the articulatory dimension and in their acoustic effect, they are seen to be phonologically hostile, in fact, because of the redundancy relation between them. This redundancy-based phonological incompatibility is implemented via licensing-failure: [low] fails to "license" [rtr] because lowness implies retraction (Ito, Mester and Padgett 1994).

Tone mapping is a computational task of significance in the context of displaying high dynamic range images on low dynamic range devices. While a number of tone mapping algorithms have been proposed and are in common use, there is no single operator that yields optimal results under all conditions. Moreover, obtaining satisfactory mappings often requires the manual tweaking of parameters. This thesis proposes interactive evolution as a computational tool for tone mapping. An evolution strategy that blends the results from several tone mapping operators while at the same time adapting their parameters is proposed. As well, the results are adapted such that such that approximately uniform perceptual distances between offspring candidate solutions and the parent are ensured. The introduction of a perceptually based step size adaptation technique enhances the control of the variability between newly generated offspring, when compared to parameter space step size adaptation.

No description available.

Thesis (MPhysio)--University of South Australia, 1998

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-160). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2006. / Computer printout. List of Ginastera's numbered compositions: leaves 135-136. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-150), and examples (leaves 151-256).