Corpora: PhD studentship

[Yuri Tambovtsev]

Yuri Tambovtsev.
Novosibirsk, Russia
Dear colleagues, I wonder if I could apply with my project for
your PhD Studentship? I wonder if I can write my doctoral 
dissertation along the lines of phono-stylistics? I'd like to create
the phonostatistical distances between some English and American 
writers. Here is my plan for the project:
The Structure of the Frequency of Occurrence of Consonants in the Speech 
Sound Chain as a Clue of Typological Closeness of English Writers.
    Every English writer has a specific structure of the speech sound chain. It can 
be distinguished by its structure from any other writer. English, as every 
language, has a unique structure of distributions of speech sounds in its phonemic 
chain. One must find out how much English as the super structure, influences this 
or that English author and what unique can this author retain, as his[her own 
style. The distribution of English vowels will not be considered till the second 
stage of the investigation. Let's point out that consonants bear the semantic load 
in the word, not vowels. Therefore, it is more possible to understand the meaning  
of the message by consonants, rather by vowels. However, if we fail to recognise 
and distinguish two languages, then we resort to the structure of occurrence of 
vowels in the speech sound chain. While comparing English authors, it is 
necessary to keep to the principle of commensurability.  Therefore, one must 
keep to the same genre or text type, for example, poetry. Actually, different style 
will give no hardship to differentiate. Having it in mind, it is not possible to 
compare texts on the basis of the frequency of occurrence of separate phonemes, 
because they may yield the same frequencies. The articulartory features may 
serve as the basic features in phono-typological reasoning. First of all, it is the 
classification of consonants according to the work of the active organ of speech 
or place of articulation (4 features). Secondly, it is the classification from the 
point of view of the manner of articulation or the type of the obstruction (3 
features). Thirdly, it is the classification according to the work of the vocal cords 
(1 feature). In this way, 8 basic features are obtained: 1) labial; 2) front; 3) 
mediolingual or palatal; 4) back or velar; 5) sonorant; 6) occlusive; 7) fricative; 
and 8) voiced consonants. One should take the values of the frequency of 
occurrence of these 8 features in the speech chain of one author and compare 
them to those of the others. On the basis of the "chi-square" test and Euclidean 
distance, I have developed my own method of measuring the phono-typological 
distances between different English writers. It takes into account the frequency of 
occurrence of the 8 consonantal groups mentioned above and builds up the 
overwhelming mosaic of the English language sound picture on the one hand, 
and of every original English writer on the other. Comparing one English writer 
to some others, one will receive some phono-typological distances between the 
English writers. One must use some English corpus since it is not possible to feed 
into computer many English writers.
Address: Russia,  Yuri 
Tambovtsev,  E-mail: 
YUTAMB at HOTMAIL.COM 

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