Clarifying Some Issues in Construction Grammar Studies

“Form-meaning pair”is not a distinctive feature of constructions,but a universal feature of all things.A construction must be a structure.Morphemes are the smallest sound-meaning assemblies,but they only represent a symbolic relationship which has no internal structure;thus,they are not constructions.In addition,if morphemes are also treated as constructions,there is a problem of“heterogeneity”in understanding the“form”of constructions.As to the rising“constructionist”and the traditional“atomist”dichotomy,we feel the“constructionist”approach complies better with the actual linguistic life.Construction Grammar leads people to pay close attention to the integrity of constructions and the cognitive mechanisms behind linguistic facts.Therefore,it is of great value both theoretically and practically.However,since Construction Grammar has not yet displayed a distinct value in terms of methodology,we must be careful not to overrate it or overestimate it.

LIFESPAN CHANGE OF VOICE IN MANDARIN CHINESE SPEAKERS

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent age and gender would affect the voice parameters of native Mandarin Chinese speakers.Participants were required to produce sustained vowel/a/with comfortable pitch and loudness.From the speech samples,34 voice parameters were extracted by using Multi-Dimensional Voice Program(MDVP).The parameters were divided into several groups according to their correlation coefficients.Groups related to F0,to short-term perturbation of period and amplitude,to long-term variation of period and amplitude,to spectrum and to duration were found to be affected by age and gender.In each of them,one of the most important parameters was selected to represent the variation tendency with gender and age.Therefore,to estimate the degree of a voice deviation from normal,the factors of age and gender should be considered.The mean and variance of the parameters were given in this paper,and were compared according to their gender and age.Finally,a normative voice database was constructed for the reference of dysphonia diagnosis for Chinese.

Laryngeal Vibratory Behavior in Traditional Noh Singing

The phonation of Noh, a traditional Japanese style of singing, was investigated using electroglot- tographic and acoustical analyses. The dynamics of the laryngeal vibratory behaviors were analyzed for the singing voice of the Noh play compared with natural speech based on the Electroglottography （EGG） pa- rameters, EGG waveform, spectrum, and spectrogram. The result shows that Noh singing is characterized by low open quotient and high speed quotient. Three types of phonations are used in the singing with pressed, Vocal-Ventricular Mode （WM）, and growl voices. It was hypothesized that the period doubling ob- served in the EGG signal was reflective of WM, which was caused by the phase difference in the vocal and ventricular fold oscillations, while the damped peak amplitude in every other cycle in the EGG signal was the result of the oscillations of the aryepiglottic folds at a frequency of half of the fundamental frequency. Sub- harmonics generated by the supraglottal oscillations add unique timbre to the sounds. The results suggest that the combination of phonation types is the key factor in generating their peculiar voice qualities.