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The paper discusses the main principles in designing and annotating speech corpora within the framework of the Saint Petersburg phonological school, and provides examples of using corpus data in phonetic research. One of the major principles that we follow is to analyse the speech material at all levels: from segmental to intonational, including speech disfluencies. During segmental phonetic annotation, we suggest listening to each speech sound in isolation (without knowing its context) and relying on spectrographic data. At the syllabic tier, it is crucial to reflect resyllabification. During prosodic annotation, we suggest to rely on listener’s perception of the intonation pattern first, then analyse the actual melodic curves. A speech corpus with multi-level annotation that follows these principles is a valuable source of phonetic data — as segmental and prosodic factors are in constant interaction with each other, and one cannot analyse units of one annotation tier without reference to other tiers.

RESUMO O artigo discute os princípios fundamentais de elaboração do projeto e anotação de corpora de fala no âmbito da Escola Fonológica de São Petersburgo e fornece os exemplos de utilização de dados de vários corpora na pesquisa em fonética. Um dos princípios fundamentais é analisar as amostras em todos os níveis: desde o segmento até a entoação, incluindo as disfluências da fala. Durante a anotação fonética, sugerimos ouvir cada som isoladamente e confiar nos dados do espectrograma. Na anotação silábica, é crucial considerar a ressilabificação. Durante a anotação prosódica, sugerimos confiar na percepção do ouvinte e analisar as curvas melódicas. Um corpus de fala que segue esses princípios é uma fonte valiosa de dados fonéticos, uma vez que os fatores segmentais e prosódicos estão em constante interação e não se pode analisar as unidades de um nível de anotação sem fazer referência aos outros.

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The article deals with the potential explicit or implicit impact of the cultural and scientific tradition on the way of thinking of the researchers in different epochs. The hypothesis is that aesthetic and philosophical thoughts may influence in some way the results of the scientific experiments. The paper follows the order of the research. It starts from the results of vowel acoustics measurements in 19th century and ends by finding their conceptual basis in works of the 17th century. Measuring vowel acoustic characteristics, researchers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in most of cases used various sets of tuning forks. The brightest, i.e. characteristic tone of a vowel was defined by ear. The results of such experiments showed that there were intervals of one or more octaves between characteristic tones of various vowels. Among different factors that may lead to such results, beside the circumstances of the experiment itself, we suppose cultural, scientific and philosophical tradition. The analysis of the works of the authors who first explored acoustic characteristics of vowels, showed that the philosophy and aesthetics of the 17th century may have influenced directly or indirectly the descriptions of vowels during the following centuries. The idea of the main vowels of the Adam Alphabet may have had an impact on the acoustic instruments, while the idea of harmony and proportion, essential in time of the Scientific Revolution, may be found in vowel system descriptions up to the beginning of the 20th century.