ABSTRACT
The research described in this chapter addresses two aspects of phonetic theory examined by John Laver. The first question is more broad, and focuses on the phonetic description of speech sounds in little studied languages (e.g., Laver, 1967). The second considers the importance of discourse context in the study of connected speech (e.g., Laver, 1980, 1991). Laver claims (1994) that both questions should play a critical role in shaping phonetic theory. I examine these questions with particular reference to a group of North Australian languages—Kayardild, Dalabon, and Mayali—which are among the few remaining spoken Australian indigenous languages. Although many Australian languages have been the focus of a great deal of grammatical description in the last 30 or more years, (e.g., Blake, 1981; Dixon, 2002), there have been relatively few large-scale linguistic phonetic analyses of their segmental properties. Moreover, it is only recently that the intonational features of some of these languages have been systematically examined. In the sections that follow, I examine vowel inventories in the three Australian languages, in the spirit of Laver’s thesis that one of the goals of phonetic theory is to explain “the phonetic regularities that serve to … make each language sound different from other languages” (Laver, 1995, p. 95). In the second part of this chapter, I examine pitch range and its role as one of the “cues that are conventionally used to claim and yield the floor in the control of speaking-turns and conversational interaction” (Laver, 1994, pp. 95–96) in two of the three languages. In particular, I investigate the contribution of pitch variation to the signaling reported speech in spontaneous narratives.
