User:DanielHirst/bio

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Daniel Hirst (born on September 29, 1946 in Brighton, England) is a linguist and phonetician, who lives and works in the South of France. He is married with one son and two grand-daughters.

After studying French, Philosophy and English Literature at St David's University College, Lampeter, Wales, he moved to France and began studying Linguistics and Phonetics at the Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence.

He completed a doctoral thesis in 1974 on the role of intonation in the disambiguation of syntax, and a second thesis in 1987 on the linguistic description of prosodic systems.

He is currently Directeur de Recherche at the CNRS Laboratoire Parole et Langage where he heads a research team on Prosody and the Formal Representation of Language (Prosodie et Représentation Formelle du Langage).

Contents

[edit] Software

Daniel Hirst has developed software for the automatic analysis of speech prosody. In particular:

  • Momel - an algorithm for the automatic modelling of fundamental frequency contours as a combination of a macromelodic compenent and a micromelodic component.
  • INTSINT -intended as a prosodic equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet, INTSINT has been implemented as an algorithm converting the output of the Momel algorithm to a sequence of discrete tonal symbols.

[edit] Organisation

In 2000, together with over 70 linguists from all over the world he founded an ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech Prosody (SProSIG) which runs a mailing list [[Speech Prosody]] and which also coordinates the International Conferences on Speech prosody.

  • First international conference on Speech Prosody April 2002, Aix-en-Provence, France
  • Second international conference on Speech Prosody April 2004, Nara, Japan
  • Third international conference on Speech Prosody May 2006, Dresden, Germany

[edit] Selected Publications

[edit] Theses

  • 1974. La levée de l'ambiguïté syntaxique par les traits intonatifs. Essai de formalisation. (Thèse de 3e cycle. Université de Provence. Directeur G. Faure)
  • 1987. La description linguistique des systèmes prosodiques : une approche cognitive. (Thèse de Doctorat d'Etat, Université de Provence, Directeur M. Rossi).

[edit] Books

  • Carton,F; Hirst,D.J. Marchal,A. & Séguinot,A. (eds.) 1977. L'accent d'insistance/emphatic stress. (= Studia Phonetica 12.) Didier, Montréal.
  • Hirst, D.J. 1977. Intonative Features. A Syntactic Approach to English Intonation. Mouton; La Haye.
  • Rossi, Mario; Di Cristo, A.; Hirst, D.J.; Martin, Philippe & Nishinuma, Y. 1980. L'Intonation : de l'Acoustique à la Sémantique. Klincksieck; Paris.
  • Dell, François; Hirst, D.J. & Vergnaud, Jean-Roger (eds). 1984. Forme Sonore du Langage : Structure des Représentations en Phonologie. Hermann; Paris.
  • Hirst, D.J. & Di Cristo, A. (eds) 1998. Intonation Systems. A survey of Twenty Languages. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. [ISBN 0 521 39513 S (Hardback); 0 521 39550 X (Paperback)].
  • Hirose, K.; Hirst, D.J. & Sagisaka, Y. (eds.) 2005. Quantitative prosody modeling for natural speech description and generation (=special issue of Speech Communication, 46 (3-4))