̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

Cambridge Festival Speaker Spotlight: Dr Martin Ruehl

zs332 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 12:04:12 +0000

Dr Martin Reuhl is a Senior Lecturer in German Intellectual History in the Faculty of History and a ̽��ֱ�� Associate Professor in German History and Thought in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Cambridge Festival celebrates pioneering women for International Women’s Day

zs332 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:28:52 +0000

For International Women’s Day (8 March), the Cambridge Festival (19 March – 4 April) is celebrating some of the remarkable contributions of women across diverse fields. From philosophy and music to AI and cosmology, the festival will highlight the pioneering work of women who have shaped our understanding of the world in profound ways.

Library life in the time of COVID

zs332 — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 09:08:51 +0000

What happens when you are a librarian without a library? This is exactly what happened with husband and wife Veronica Phillips, Assistant Librarian at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Medical Library, and Matthias Ammon, Research Support Librarian at Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Library. Here they discuss their experience of living, and working, through the coronavirus pandemic.

Creation of a new Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

ns480 — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:52:39 +0000

Building on the strengths of the previous institutions, the new department will cover a yet more comprehensive domain of the language sciences and provide stronger theoretical, empirical and interdisciplinary research across the board from historical linguistics and comparative syntax to language processing and computational linguistics.

New to the department will be the broader teaching of both theoretical and applied linguistics topics at all levels (undergraduate and graduate). ̽��ֱ��former Department of Linguistics recently created a Linguistics Tripos, and with all the staff from both previous departments, the new department will have the flexibility to admit many more qualified students.

Additionally, while the two existing M.Phil courses will still run separately in the academic year 2011-2012, from the year 2012-2013 the new department will offer a joint M.Phil in which students can choose to focus on either more theoretical or more applied areas (or a mixture of both). PhD students will be able to profit from more staff, more interdisciplinary opportunities and more support overall.

Henriette Hendriks, Head of the new Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “I feel very lucky to have been given the opportunity to work in the new department with this group of colleagues with a common goal of taking the research and teaching of Linguistics in Cambridge to new heights.”

For more information about the new department, you can visit their website at www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal

Two Cambridge institutions, the Department of Linguistics and the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, have merged as of 1 August 2011 to form the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.

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Rethinking eccentricity

bjb42 — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Since the 18th century, English culture has been associated (both by the English themselves and by continental observers) with unusual tolerance towards unconventional and peculiar individuals. Even today, eccentricity is often seen as an obligatory component of the English national character. ̽��ֱ��eccentric is typically portrayed as a harmless and amiable figure, someone who provides others with a pleasant diversion from the tedium of everyday life.

But how historically representative are these received ideas of eccentricity? This question has formed the basis of my research and the subject of my recent book, which seeks to investigate more sceptically the cultural and ideological functions of eccentricity.

My research starts from two sets of assumptions: first, that eccentricity is neither timeless nor universal; second, that it is by no means always harmless and absurd. Eccentricity is, instead, a historically relative and context-dependent term, which must be situated within the broader histories of individualism and deviance. Eccentricity often elicited violent and conflicting responses, and was associated with potentially disturbing figures such as the insane, social marginals, human ‘monsters’ and the tempestuous Romantic genius. Beliefs about eccentricity varied widely across European national traditions, and were underpinned by complex assumptions about gender and class.

I chose 19th-century Paris as the focus of the study precisely because its culture was significantly different from English culture. ̽��ֱ��modern concept of eccentricity had crystallised in 18th-century England, a culture increasingly interested in poetic and psychological originality. Pre-Revolutionary French culture, by contrast, was markedly hostile to both originality and individual difference. It asserted that elegance was timeless, upheld rigid ideals of good taste and decorum, and stressed the need for social conformism. It was precisely the initial strength of French resistance to the values of eccentricity, I suggest, which make its reception after 1830 so revealing of tensions in French cultural identity.

Ambivalent emotions

Breaking with convention aroused highly ambivalent responses in 19th-century Parisian readers, writers and spectators. Eccentricity was debated in a wide range of sources, including etiquette manuals, fashion magazines, newspapers, novels, plays, political pamphlets, and scientific and psychiatric treatises. On the one hand, the scandal of ‘standing out’ evoked the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, namely its dreams of freedom, creativity and individuality. On the other, it symbolised the deepest anxieties of this class, the threat of madness, monstrosity and sin. Eccentricity was therefore simultaneously desired and feared, incorporated into and rejected from bourgeois identity.

Why were the French so ambivalent towards eccentricity? ̽��ֱ��French Revolution in 1789 inaugurated a century of unprecedented social and political instability, generating a strong desire in the French elite to create social cohesion and order. An orderly society entailed the suppression of any challenges to social norms. At the same time, however, the influence of Romanticism led to an increasing desire for individual freedom and fulfilment, whilst the bourgeoisie had strong faith in social and intellectual progress. ̽��ֱ��latter tendencies inevitably led to many norms and traditions being called into question, and 19th-century Parisian culture was at the forefront of attempts to probe the fragile boundaries between conformism and eccentricity. Three cultural fields in which this is most evident are fashion, bohemia and science.

Followers of fashion

Eccentricity in Paris of the 1830s was linked to flamboyant new fashions and the seductions of commodity culture. ̽��ֱ��values of fashion, including novelty and bizarreness, were diametrically at odds with the traditional values of French politeness and etiquette. Eccentric styles epitomised the intoxicating dangers of modernity, and were championed by a range of unconventional figures, including male and female dandies and the aristocratic figure of the lionne or lioness. ̽��ֱ��lionne rejected the fragility and hysteria associated with respectable women, and engaged instead in energetic ‘masculine’ pursuits such as horse-riding and smoking. But increasingly, such eccentricity was linked to demi-mondaines and courtesans, who, it was feared, were corrupting the morality and health of the social elite.

Bohemian culture

After Napoleon III’s coup d’état of 1851, the social position of the writer and artist became more problematic. Eccentricity was associated with the artists, social marginals and urban poor who inhabited ‘the unknown Paris’. This murky underworld fascinated bourgeois observers as much as it horrified them. Writers and journalists documented their ambivalent responses to exhibitions of human freaks in the fairground and to the half-mad visionaries of bohemian street culture. They were uneasily aware that they too failed to conform to bourgeois norms and that some eccentrics might be unrecognised geniuses.

Scientific theory

̽��ֱ��popularisation of medical theories of national decline after 1851 led to increasing moral panic. Eccentricity was interpreted as a symptom of insanity and concealed deformity, and eccentrics were often portrayed as a dangerous social menace which psychiatrists and legislators struggled to contain. Despite this, many writers, including Gérard de Nerval, Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Vallès, championed ‘pathological’ and ‘monstrous’ forms of eccentricity. Their writing constitutes an act of symbolic resistance to a culture which defined normality, virtue and health in increasingly restrictive and unimaginative terms.

A contemporary debate

In charting the history of eccentricity, one conclusion I arrived at was that beliefs about precisely how much individuals are permitted to diverge from social norms differ considerably between cultures in response to very specific socio-historical factors. Gender appears to be central to the imagination of deviance in this period since what was deeply eccentric for women was often considered quite normal for men, and vice versa. Ultimately, the experience of ambivalence is inseparable from European modernity: eccentricity represents one compelling set of values (novelty, freedom, individuality) which clashed significantly with other, equally compelling values (stability, order, community). In many ways, this type of clash is central to debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy about the plurality of values and goods.

̽��ֱ��interdisciplinary focus of the project continues to develop, as it traces the migration of concepts and metaphors between literature, popular culture and science. Continuing to emphasise the ways in which social and psychological categories are implicitly shaped by values and norms, my research is now focusing on a cultural history of paranoia and suspicion in French modernity.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Miranda Gill (mfg24@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of French, in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.

Miranda Gill traces shifting 19th-century perceptions of eccentricity, from its association with the intoxicating lure of modernity and fashion to the murky underworld of circus freaks and half-mad visionaries.

Eccentricity is, instead, a historically relative and context-dependent term, which must be situated within the broader histories of individualism and deviance.

by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Rethinking

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Yes

‘Sex, scandal and sermon’ in medieval Spain

ns480 — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:40:21 +0000

̽��ֱ��medieval poem Libro de Buen Amor (‘ ̽��ֱ��Book of Good Love’) by Juan Ruiz tells the story of 14 failed love affairs, combined with animal fables, sacred and profane lyrics, and doctrinal matters. ̽��ֱ��ribald tales, colloquial language and vivid characters (particularly the narrator, an Archpriest ‘fallen’ from grace because of his amorous dalliances) have led Ruiz to be dubbed the ‘Spanish Chaucer’. Its 1728 stanzas are the subject of a new analysis, which is due to be published in April 2008, by Dr Louise Haywood from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

̽��ֱ��canonical work by Juan Ruiz is of great importance for its contemporary references and literary scope. It is richly evocative of medieval cultural attitudes relating to love, religion and emotion, and hence is a much-studied work among students and scholars of Iberian literature from this era. ‘It is one of the most challenging and thought-provokingly diverse works in world literature,’ said Dr Haywood, ‘and its impact on Spanish culture continues to be felt today.’

Humour has long been recognised as an important part of Ruiz’s artistry but Dr Haywood’s study of the Libro will be the first to approach the role of humour systematically in this iconic work. ‘I have re-positioned Juan Ruiz’s Libro in relation to broader trends in 14th-century culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between humour and scholasticism, the body, and visual culture. In essence: sex, scandal and sermon.’

For more information, please contact Dr Louise Haywood (lmh37@cam.ac.uk), whose book Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz’s ‘Libro de Buen Amor’ will be published on 1 April 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan.

A new study of the 14th-century narrative poem Libro de Buen Amor explores how its earthy tales of failed love are shaped by humour.

I have re-positioned Juan Ruiz’s Libro in relation to broader trends in 14th-century culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between humour and scholasticism, the body, and visual culture.

Dr Louise Haywood

Jule_Berlin

Cloister of Santa Maria la Real in Najera

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Yes

Can a voice identify a criminal?

tdk25 — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Recognising a voice is a familiar experience for most people – identifying a friend’s voice over the telephone, recognising the voice of a well-known personality on the radio, hearing the voice of a colleague call out from behind. But why do voices sound distinctive? Given our ability to recognise individuals, it seems reasonable to assume that voices are unique, but it has not been scientifically demonstrated that all voices are measurably distinctive. In spite of the impression given by televised crime shows, as yet there is no technique available to identify a speaker with 100% reliability.

This is a serious problem for forensic speaker identification, a branch of forensic phonetics in which a phonetician is asked to identify an unknown speaker whose voice has been recorded during the committing of a crime, for example a bomb threat, ransom demand, hoax emergency call or drug deal. ̽��ֱ��phonetician compares the incriminating recording with samples of speech from a suspect with a view to identifying the perpetrator or eliminating the suspect. These cases are often controversial, and since the extent to which an individual’s voice is idiosyncratic has not yet been established, research in this area is crucial.

A key problem in attempting to characterise a speaker is that each individual’s voice can vary greatly. We change our voices depending on who we are talking to, how formal the situation is, the emotion we wish to express and whether there is background noise. Speakers’ voices also change if they are tired, drunk or have a cold or sore throat, and of course speakers can disguise their voices. So a voice is much more complicated to capture than a fingerprint, which is a fixed, unchanging feature of an individual.

DyViS: investigating speech

A team of researchers in the Department of Linguistics – Dr Kirsty McDougall, Dr Gea de Jong, Toby Hudson and Professor Francis Nolan – is carrying out innovative research in speaker identification in the DyViS project (Dynamic Variability in Speech: A Forensic Phonetic Study of British English), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

To investigate the problem of variation within a speaker’s voice, the DyViS team have compiled a large-scale database of recordings of southern British English spoken across a range of speaking styles. Speakers participated in several tasks: a mock police interview where they were required to ‘lie’ about a particular scenario, a telephone call with a friend involving a more casual and relaxed style of speech, and a number of reading tasks. All of the speaking tasks included a particular selection of words that the participants had to utter in different contexts. These data enable the researchers to investigate how phonetic features of these words change for a given individual across the different speaking styles, and to what extent these features can be used to distinguish individuals.

Identifying the speaker

One particular feature being examined is a phenomenon known as ‘formant frequency dynamics’. Formant frequencies are the resonances of the vocal tract during speech – the frequencies at which vibrations of air are at maximum amplitude in the vocal tract in speech sounds such as vowels. Formant frequencies appear as roughly horizontal dark bands on a spectrogram, a computer-generated representation of the acoustic speech signal. These frequencies are powerful cues to speaker identity since they are determined by both the physical dimensions of a speaker’s vocal tract and the way the speaker configures the vocal organs to produce each sound.

Previous research on speaker differences has typically measured the formant frequencies only at the centre of the sound. ̽��ֱ��DyViS research goes beyond these ‘static’ measures to investigate the dynamics of formant frequencies, which reflect the movement of a person’s speech organs and are likely to reveal more fine-grained differences among speakers. Just as people exhibit personal styles for walking, running and other skilled motor activities, they move their vocal organs in individual ways when producing speech.

Dr McDougall’s experiments have investigated the speaker-distinguishing potential of the formant frequency dynamics of the vowel sound in spoken words like bike and hike, of the vowel sound in who’d, and of sequences containing an ‘r’ sound preceded and followed by vowel sounds such as a route and a rack. ̽��ֱ��work shows that formant frequency dynamics carry considerable speaker-specific information. By taking measurements along the formant contours surrounding the centre of a speech sound, a significant improvement in speaker discrimination is achieved.

Forensic phonetics

Together with research into other features of speech being investigated by the DyViS team, this work offers crucial new directions for solutions to the problem of extracting a speaker’s ‘signature’ from the speech signal. Findings from the DyViS project suggest that dynamic features of speech could provide a clue in speaker identification, which has clear applications in forensic evidence – in comparing voices and speech for purposes of identification, and in analysing speech recordings.

̽��ֱ��research also has important implications for phonetic theory. Current models of speech production and perception do not provide a good explanation of the role of individual variation in speech communication. ̽��ֱ��analysis of dynamic features of speech being undertaken by the DyViS team will lead to important theoretical developments in these areas, contributing to our understanding of how individual speakers can communicate with the same language yet sound so different from each other.

Innovative research in the Department of Linguistics suggests that dynamic features of speech could provide a clue to forensic speaker identification.

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Ear

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Yes