ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the gestural theory of duration developed at Haskins. It investigates the "classical" theory of duration by means of looking at a formally defined version due to Dennis Klatt from a rather abstract point of view, and deducing predictions on the basis of this formal definition, rather than on the basis of measurements. The classical model, as embodied in the synthesis algorithm of MITalk, is deterministic: its ultimate justification comes not from good fit with duration measurements but from the quality of duration synthesis it produces. Length measurements always yield an empirical distribution with a heavy tail: the number of tokens with duration mode will be in excess of the number of tokens with duration below the mode. The key idea of model-theoretic semantics is to specify a mapping, the interpretation function, which links the theoretical structure under investigation to actual structures that can be found in reality.
