The focus of this chapter is on sounds. The chapter begins with an introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet to show how you can represent sounds with written symbols. The discussion turns to phonetic features of sounds and how they are connected to physical features of human anatomy. The second section focuses on the production and features of consonant sounds while the third section explores vowels and their features. The final section discusses how to create a balanced sound inventory when selecting sounds for your language. By the end of this chapter, you will select the consonant and vowel sounds you want to incorporate in your conlang.

This chapter explores the stages involved in qualitative research data analysis and how to conduct it effectively. We begin by defining qualitative data analysis and explaining its purpose, which is to derive meaning from nonnumeric data, often gathered through interviews, observations, or textual sources. We then discuss the coding process, a key element in qualitative data analysis, explaining its role in organizing data into meaningful categories and how it can be conducted. We distinguish between different types of coding, such as open and axial coding. Throughout, we emphasize the importance of rigor and validity in ensuring credible results. We also provide an overview of various methods used in qualitative data analysis, including content analysis, thematic analysis, discourse analysis, and grounded theory, highlighting how these approaches can be applied to identify patterns, themes, and insights from the data. By the end of the chapter, you will have a comprehensive understanding of qualitative data analysis and the skills to apply these methods effectively.

This chapter surveys the fields of musicology and dance studies, examining some of the most influential historically themed scholarship that has emerged within the two disciplines – and echoed across their own disciplinary histories – since the early twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the work of towering musicologist Richard Taruskin and dance expert Lynn Garafola, the chapter provides a useful account of the ballet’s scholarly legacy and the principal themes that have arisen across what has been a stupendous (and seemingly endless) volume of literature. Of these themes, race, gender and national identity prove particularly enduring, as generations of scholars seek to situate the ballet within coterminous histories of rupture and continuity.

The chapter demonstrates that selecting an object of study is a consequential part of doing discourse analysis. Selecting an object of study requires considering many planning and analytic issues that are often neglected in introductory books on discourse analysis. This chapter reviews many of these planning and analytic issues, including how to organize and present data. After reading the chapter, readers will know how to structure an analysis; understand what data excerpts are and how to introduce them in an analysis; be able to create and present an object of study as smaller data excerpts; and know how to sequence an analysis.

Social interaction is inescapably multimodal, composed of talk (e.g., lexical items, syntax, prosody), nonlexical conduct (e.g., breathing, laughter, sighing, response cries), and solely visible (or embodied) conduct (e.g., body posture and movement, hand gestures, object manipulation). While this chapter concerns the transcription of social interaction, its primary goal is not to explain transcription conventions and instruct readers how to use them (these topics are dealt with secondarily). Rather, the primary goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the analytic necessity and usefulness of systematic and detailed transcription practices, including those for both vocal and visual conduct (e.g., systems developed by Gail Jefferson and Lorenza Mondada, respectively). We achieve this goal by applying a wide range of transcription practices to a single video clip of mundane, dinner-time English conversation, illustrating how transcription both is, and contributes to, an analytic process. We discuss practical difficulties associated with transcription, especially that of visual conduct. Ultimately, we show that transcription is essential to understanding topics such as turn-taking, sequentiality, (dis)affiliation, emotion, stance, and social action itself.

The terms linguistics and philology refer to different but overlapping areas of the Humanities. An opposition between them does not predate the triumph of structuralism. Structuralist linguistics devoted itself mainly to synchrony and theory, with lexicology and lexicography ending up in no-man’s land. A detailed look at dictionary definitions of linguistics and philology for more than three centuries offers a picture of the goals of both disciplines and of the ways the public understood language studies. Before the twentieth century, the focus of philology was the interpretation of old texts and word origins. The treatment of special terminology (including the terminology of linguistics) in dictionaries shows that despite all the differences a clear line between linguistics and philology cannot and need not be drawn, just as such a line cannot always be drawn between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. In the context of the present study, the use of etymology and phonetic transcription in various dictionaries illuminates the difference between and the unity of philology and linguistics.

The HLVC project applies consistent methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to a range of languages and dependent variables. This is meant to mitigate the pattern of diverse findings from diverse studies that may partially result from diverse methods. This chapter therefore describes how the corpus is constructed, focusing on the cross-linguistic, cross-generational, and multi-method design, and gives details about recruiting, recording, and transcription of the sociolinguistic interview, the ethnic orientation questionnaire, the picture description task, and the consent procedure. It then describes the workflow for data processing and metadata construction, describing both how the corpus is organized (to be useful to additional researchers) and how we have analyzed variation of a number of variables to date. These include prodrop, case-marking, VOT, and (r) across multiple languages, apocope and differential object marking in Italian, and tone mergers, classifiers, motion-even marking, denasalization (an element of so-called lazy pronunciation, 懶音 laan5 jam1), and vowel space in Cantonese. It details the methods of analyzing ethnic orientation and several proxies for fluency (speech rate, vocabulary size, language-switching measures). Finally, it describes the methods used for constructing and comparing mixed-effects models for cross-variety comparisons in order to distinguish contact-induced change, internal change, and identity-marking variation.

This chapter covers the complete life cycle of microRNAs, from start to finish. Beginning with their location in the genome, how they are transcribed and some of the factors that switch microRNAs on and off, it moves next to the biochemical steps involved in the step-wise processing of the precursor RNA by the enzymes Drosha and Dicer, before the microRNA is eventually loaded into a pocket in the Argonaute protein ready to carry out gene silencing. For some steps, a deeper look is taken into the atomic structures of these biological nanomachines and how they pivot and adjust to join together proteins and RNA as they perform their functions. This includes the remarkable search strategy by which the gene silencing complex containing a microRNA probes for binding sites on mRNA targets. Finally comes the molecular decision-making behind how much protein is reduced and by what mechanism. The when and how a microRNA knows its work is done and what finally extinguishes its effects. Again, the chapter conveys the intense competition among scientists vying to answer the next question and the one after that, which was a potent accelerant for discovery.

As there are many different methods of linguistic analysis, there are many different ways of approaching gesture analysis. This chapter gives a selective overview of the current state of art on gesture coding and annotation systems. It opens with a discussion on the difference between coding and annotation, before it considers aims and challenges in gesture coding and annotation. Afterward, the chapter reviews existing systems and reflects on the interrelation between subject, research question, coding and annotation system. The chapter emphasizes that coding and annotations systems are always influenced by the particular theoretical framework in which they are situated. Accordingly, similar to the analysis of language, a theory-neutral analysis of gestures is not possible. Rather, theoretical assumptions influence subjects, aspects and levels of analysis and as such also make themselves visible in annotation systems. This will be illustrated by exemplary research topics in gestures studies: language, language development, cognition, interaction, and human–machine interaction. The account of the individual systems thereby does not aim at an extensive discussion, but rather focuses on their general logic for answering their particular research question. Here, differences between systems addressing the same research topic (e.g. language) as well as differences across research topics (e.g. language vs. interaction) will be explored. The chapter closes with some considerations on possible future developments.

This chapter draws on the author’s experience as a musicologist, philosopher, and ornithologist to examine different perspectives on birdsong in Messiaen, including verisimilitude, ecology, and Messiaen’s practice of notation. It places Messiaen’s birdsong in the context of his thought and examines the meaning of this important formant and creative source in Messiaen’s work.

BAFTA-winning British television writer/director/producer Sally Wainwright is known for her commitment to telling women’s stories as well as to her home county of Yorkshire. She used to visit Anne Lister’s Shibden Hall as a child, and her twenty years of effort to bring a drama about Lister to the small screen - after being repeatedly turned down by those who saw it as unfilmable or niche - has finally paid off with the runaway success of the BBC/HBO’s Gentleman Jack, set in 1832 when Lister began courting Ann Walker. The two-season TV series is notable not just for how it draws on the whole corpus of the past four decades of Lister research - thoughtfully balancing accuracy against the requirements of family-friendly, prestige primetime drama - but for the way it has in turn nourished a new wave of scholarship. When Wainwright won the 2016 Wellcome Screenwriting Fellowship which is intended to buy a writer time and space to work, she generously funded the scanning and online publication of all 7,720 pages of Lister’s diaries by West Yorkshire Archive Service and Calderdale Museums, which has enabled the ongoing, crowdsourced transcription of this extraordinary corpus.

This chapter describes both the process of creating a corpus as well as the methodological considerations that guide this process. It opens with a detailed discussion of the planning that went into the building of four different types of corpora: the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), and the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). The structure of each of these corpora is also discussed: their length, the genres that they contain (e.g prose fiction, press reportage, blogs, spontaneous conversations, scripted speech), and other pertinent information. Subsequent sections discuss other topics relevant to building a corpus, such as defining exactly what a corpus is (can the web be considered a corpus?); determining the appropriate size of a corpus and the length of particular texts that the corpus will contain (complete texts versus shorter samples from each text, e.g. 2,000 words); selecting the particular genres be included a corpus (e.g. press reportage, technical writing, spontaneous conversations, scripted speech); and insuring that the writers or speakers whose speech or writing is included are balanced for such issues as gender, ethnicity, and age.

The introduction begins by establishing Chaucer’s place at the epicentre of intersections between the medieval past and an early modern present. It presents a new angle on the history of the Chaucerian book, suggesting that the poet’s prominence in early modern print facilitated continued interest in his medieval manuscript volumes. Next, it explores the cultural status of manuscripts in early modern England and considers how, why, and by whom medieval manuscripts were sold, collected, read, and even remade. It compares the relative authority and desirability of old manuscripts to print, and highlights the importance of both media within early modern antiquarian circles. Finally, the introduction re-evaluates the concept of the hybrid book and proposes that the historically attested idea of perfecting be added to the critical lexicon for the study of early modern reading. Through a series of contemporary examples which illustrate its usage in the context of bibliographical completeness, it contends that perfecting offers a nuanced means of characterising the updates that readers made to their old books in the spirit of improvement.

Latin loanwords (and codeswitches) were normally written in the Greek alphabet and took Greek endings. Their spellings started out as approximate transcriptions of the Latin pronunciation (not transliterations of the Latin spelling), but over time the Greek spellings could either remain fixed as the Latin pronunciation changed or be updated to reflect such changes. Most loanwords joined a Greek declensional class that closely resembled their Latin declension, but some changed declension or gender when borrowed. Some borrowings (including all verbs) acquired Greek suffixes as part of the borrowing process. Some loanwords were created by univerbating Latin phrases, making Latin-Latin compounds, or making Greek-Latin compounds with the Latin element taken directly from Latin. Derivatives could also be formed from previously-borrowed loanwords using any of the usual Greek derivation and compoundingprocesses.

A key aspect of academic phonetics is transcription. Transcription involves writing speech in a special alphabet called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that permits writing the sounds of speech with great precision. The modern IPA is the result of historical development, and it incorporates a number of principles that contribute to ease of use: based on the latin (roman) alphabet; extending letters by modification of latin letters; use of other known letters; use of diacritics (accents); and others. Transcription may lean toward being broad or phonological, ortoward being narrow or strictly phonetic. The IPA makes typographic distinctions that we do not make in nonphonetic writing. Glyphs are specific letter shapes, and the IPA may distinguish glyphs that are not distinguished in ordinary writing.

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.

Chapter 4 describes how living systems are organised at the molecular level, beginning with the chemistry of carbon-based systems and the concept of emergent properties. The genetic code and the flow of information are introduced as a key central theme, and the structure of DNA and RNA is presented. An outline of gene structure and organisation in prokaryotes and eukaryotes is followed by the description of transcription and translation as the mechanisms by which genes are expressed. A broader look at how genomes are organised leads to an outline of the transcriptome and proteome as two important concepts that are key to understanding how the genome functions in adaptive and developmental contexts.