John Local,BA,Ph.D. (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) (born 1947), is a Britishphonetician and Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at theUniversity of York. He was one of the creators of the experimental Yorktalk non-segmental speech synthesis system (original computational implementation was by John Coleman) which employed techniques of Firthian Prosodic Analysis (FPA), an approach to phonology developed byJ.R. Firth and members of theLondon School of linguistics. His bookDoing Phonology written withJohn Kelly provides a radical contemporary take on FPA. Arising out of work which combined detailed phonetic analysis andConversation Analysis (French and Local 1983) his recent research has explored the interactional functioning of phonetic detail and phonetic variation in talk-in-interaction (Local and Walker 2005). According to Ford and Couper-Kuhlen (2004), Local's work 'has been seminal in founding a phonology for conversation. ... his studies have revealed dimensions of patterned sound production in talk-in-interaction hitherto unfathomed' (2004:13).
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