Intonation

The JapanAssociation ofCollege English Teachers {JACET) "Wbuld you close the door?" can be said in variQus ways using diliferent intoriation (and of course context) such as "impatiently or angrily by a parent to a child, with'fa11ing, "imperative"

This dissertation describes the development and testing of a software application known as The Intonation Machine. This application was designed as a Method of Adjustment style tool to be used by music educators and music education researchers as both a data gathering instrument used measure participants’ ability to resolve two sinusoidal tones to a unison, and as a pedagogical tool to help participants improve their basic pitch sense through the aural detection and resolution of beat-interference. Literature regarding intonation perception and performance, intonation pedagogy, additional psychological factors, and ancestor technologies are reviewed. The research methodology known as Software Development as Research is used as a framework for the development of the key components of the application. These key components and their functions are described and used to develop a working piece of software. Qualitative data regarding the software was collected from three stakeholder groups (music educators, music education researchers, and music students) and was assessed regarding a number of factors such as ease of use and usefulness for education and research, with a majority of participants reporting the software to be useful for their stakeholder group and relatively easy to use. The implications and potential uses of this software are discussed. The application has been made available for free, and can be found at the URL https://pastebin.com/PBSrtbij.
INDEX WORDS:  Software, Intonation, Method of Adjustment, Pedagogy, Music Education

The paper presents a general test of intonational comprehension of English that can be used by learners of any native language. The test consists of several sentences of English spoken with particular intonation patterns of tonality, tonicity and tone, conveying general or local meanings in English. Three alternative interpretations are provided for each sentence, the learner having to match each sentence with only one of the interpretations. It is proposed that the test may be enlarged and/or modified so as to be applicable in diagnosing and predicting difficulties with the intonation of any new language, as well as providing insight into particulars and universals of intonation.

This study explores the effect of different intonation strategies applied to audio commercials on the cognitive processing of the listener. A within-subjects experiment was conducted in which participants listened to 16 radio ads that had been created with different models of intonation designed to vary the announcer’s pitch range. Dependent variables were self-reported effectiveness and adequacy, skin conductance level (SCL) and recognition memory. Results showed that radio ads presented by announcers whose pitch transitioned from high frequency to low achieved better perceived effectiveness, elicited greater sympathetic nervous system activation and attained better recognition accuracy than the ads with no pitch variations and variations from low to high pitch.

This paper explores whether the teaching of English intonation within the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) contributes to the development of intonation skills of Argentine Spanish speakers to become teachers of English as a Foreign Language. The findings of the study that focused on the oral production of students in the first course of phonetics in the programme offered at the National University of Rio Cuarto are presented. This paper reports the analysis of recordings of first-year students reading an English text aloud and the results obtained in the pre- and post-tests reveal that there was improvement in students’ oral production such as in tone system considering the three systems of intonation in SFL after a series of training sessions. Hence, this approach seems promising for the development of intonation skills and oral skills in foreign language learners. These results favour for teacher trainers as well as for trainers   Keywords: EFL, intonation, syste...

The phenomenon of clitic replication in Bulgarian involves two linguistic entities: a full-fledged nominal constituent in a particular syntactic function and a co-referent weak pronominal form corresponding to the particular syntactic function. In this paper we present experimental results which support our hypothesis that the nominal material that is replicated by a pronominal clitic in Bulgarian utterances consistently exhibits thematic intonational properties.

This study examines the deviation in the intonation of simultaneously sounding tones under the condition of an embedded melody task. Two professional musicians (trumpet players) were chosen as subjects to play the missing upper voice of a four-part audio example, while listening via headphones to the remaining three parts in adaptive five-limit just intonation and equal temperament. The experimental paradigm was that of a controlled varied condition with a 2 (tuning systems) ´ 5 (interval categories) ´ 5 (renditions) ´ 2 (players) factorial design. An analysis of variance showed a nonsignificant difference between the average deviation of harmonic intonation in the two systems used. Mean deviations of 4.9 cents (SD = 6.5 cents) in the equal-temperament condition and of 6.7 cents (SD = 8.1 cents) in the just-intonation condition were found. Thus, we assume that the musicians employed the same intonation for equaltemperament and just-intonation versions (an unconscious "always the same" strategy) and could not successfully adapt their performances to the just-intonation tuning system. Fewer deviations could be observed in the equal-temperament condition. This overall tendency can be interpreted as a "burn in" effect and is probably the consequence of longterm intonation practice with equal-temperament. Finally, a theoretical model of intonation is developed by use of factor analysis. Four factors that determine intonation patterns were revealed: the "major third factor," the "minor third and partials factor," the "instrumental tuning factor," and the "octave-minor seventh factor." To summarize, even in expert musicians, intonation is not determined by abstract tuning systems but is the result of an interaction among compositional features, the acoustics of the particular musical instrument, and deviation patterns in specific intervals.

En los estudios sobre entonación se pone de manifiesto la necesidad de que la fonética experimental cuente con criterios estandarizados para interpretar las mediciones tonales. Uno de estos criterio es el umbral a partir del cual una prominencia tonal puede ser perceptible y/o relevante. Pese a la importancia de esta cuestión no hay unanimidad acerca de las diferencias mínimas perceptibles. El trabajo que sigue presenta un experimento sobre el umbral perceptivo de las diferencias tonales en español peninsular. Los resultados indican que los sujetos pueden discriminar diferencias tonales con diferencias de 1,5 semitonos.

Dans cet article, nous présenterons les résultats d’un test de perception où 28 informateurs finnophones ayant un niveau avancé en français ont entendu les cinq premières pages de L’étranger d’Albert Camus. Leur tâche a consisté à ajouter tous les points et les virgules au texte écrit correspondant sur la base des indices prosodiques.  Les résultats montrent qu’un contour intonatif descendant, où l’intonation baisse jusqu’au plancher de la tessiture du locuteur, est fortement associé à la présence d’un point ; un contour descendant moins profond n’est pas aussi fortement associé au point. Les virgules sont performées des manières différentes, et elles sont interprétées en perception comme des virgules ou comme des continuatifs sans ponctuation.

An approach towards outlining a practical understanding of ancient music. Particularly dealing with aspects of ancient Greek music, as recounted by the translated fragments of Aristoxenus, Ptolemy and others. In brief, a summary guide defining a method for practically realising harmonic relations, rhythmic poetics, the varieties of the tonal genera, and tetrachord theory using standard techniques of rational string division.
(Please note: This is an incomplete review copy and as such does not contain the full text of this manuscript. If you would like the full picture, please do get in touch with me.)

Este trabajo describe la entonación del español hablado en la ciudad de Oaxaca, México, como parte de los trabajos realizados al construir el Corpus oral del español de México (COEM), siendo el objetivo principal de ese proyecto producir descripciones dialectales y sociolingüísticas que conduzcan al desarrollo de una geoprosodia del español mexicano. Para ello, se describe ahora una serie de enunciados que llevan a cabo diversos actos de habla, principalmente aseverativos y directivos, en los datos producidos por nueve personas en habla semiespontánea. La perspectiva del trabajo es esencialmente cualitativa, aunque se presentan diversos resúmenes cuantitativos. Todo el material ha sido analizado acústicamente y etiquetado siguiendo las convenciones del sistema Sp_ToBI. En la discusión de los resultados, se hace una comparación con la entonación de la Ciudad de México. La conclusión más relevante es que la entonación semiespontánea de Oaxaca forma parte del conjunto de las hablas del centro del país, aunque con matices propios. Se subraya que los patrones tonales empleados para proyectar prosódicamente la mayor parte de los actos de habla son más bien tendencias, no soluciones categóricas.

Text-to-speech (TTS) conversion system enables user to enter text in Gujarati language and as an output it generates the equivalent sound. This type of system will be greatly useful for illiterate and vision-impaired people to hear and understand the content. TTS systems are still suffering from the problem of producing emotional speech like that of human being. Scientists are trying to give emotions and feelings to it. This shows that research work can be done to enhance the efficiency of TTS system. There are TTS systems that are under development for many languages other than Gujarati language. So, we are proposing the TTS system, which will work on Gujarati language. The input of our desired system is typed or scanned Gujarati text and equivalent Gujarati speech with smooth flow will be generated as an output. We are trying to add a new feature through which we can hear our own voice by superimposing our own voice frequency on the prerecorded synthesized speech, so that we can listen to any text in our own voice. This paper starts with the introduction to the fundamental concepts of TTS synthesis. So, it will be useful for the readers who are less familiar in this area of research.

The chapter provides an overview of the general prosodic characteristics of European Portuguese, including stress, accent, rhythm and intonation. Typical intonation patterns of the language are then described, whether associated with basic sentence types or with expressivity, phrasing and focus.

Basing himself on pioneering research (Wilde 1938; Strang 1964; Jarman & Cruttenden 1976; Knowles 1975, 1978, 1981; Currie 1979; Pellowe & Jones 1978; Local 1986; McElholm 1986; Ladd & Lindsay 1991) and on his own observations, Cruttenden (1995) identified a number of intonation features common to different cities in Northern Britain which he regrouped under the appellation of ‘UNB’ (‘Urban North British’). Cruttenden subsequently defined ‘Urban North British Intonation’ as “an intonational system that operates in a number of cities in northern Britain […] characterised by a default intonation involving rising or rising-slumping nuclear pitch patterns” (Cruttenden 2007).
Investigating the same phenomenon, Wilhelm (2011) came to the conclusion that UNBI was not properly an intonation system, but rather a “metasystem” or a set of distinct systems, insofar as Northern British accents exhibit great intonational variety.
Based on a provisional corpus made up of recordings from the PAC project completed by additional material taken from other corpora, this presentation argues (contra Wilhelm 2011) that UNBI is essentially a unique system and not a set of indirectly related sequences of features. It attempts to provide an inventory of the main tones of which it is comprised, and suggests that the fundamental unity of UNBI could shed light on the vexed question of its origins (Cruttenden 1995; Hirst 2008).
This paper is intended as the first stage of an investigation of intonational variation in Britain within the framework of the PAC project, "La Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure: The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure" coordinated by Philip Carr, Jacques Durand and Anne Przewozny-Desriaux from France (http://www.projet-pac.net/).

The Formosan languages are the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. These languages are part of the Austronesian language family, and represent all but one primary branch of this family of 1,200+ languages. The Formosan languages are endangered, some critically so. While these languages have seen attention in the literature for their syntactic and phonological systems, little work has been done on their prosodic structure or intonation.

This dissertation analyzes the prosodic structure and intonational phonology of Mantauran Rukai, Budai Rukai, Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, Sandimen Paiwan, Piuma Paiwan, Kavalan, Amis, Bunun, Tgdaya Seediq, Truku Seediq, and Pazeh, based on original fieldwork. In addition, archival materials are incorporated into analyses of Tsou, Truku Seediq, Tgdaya Seediq, and Puyuma.

This study finds that the Formosan languages show rich tonal phonologies in their intonational systems, and have complex interactions between stress assignment and morphology. Some examples include the following: Mantauran Rukai, previously described as an initial-stress language, actually has a complex stress assignment system with an alternation between first- and third-syllable stress, which as a system is unique in descriptions of stress assignment in the world’s languages. Hla’alua (Saaroa), previously described as having free variation between antepenultimate and penultimate stress, actually has an accent system in which some lexical items are consistently produced without an accented syllable, while others are. Hla’alua also has a rich tonal phonology assigned at two higher levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Kavalan has a unique rule that causes spreading tones to shift to the opposite domain edge when a certain number of tonal elements are aligned to the same boundary. Elements of the intonational phonology in Amis and Kavalan include glottal stops in addition to tonal elements. Bunun has distinct pitch accent melodies for words vs. clitics.

In addition to the unique features found in individual Formosan languages, this dissertation’s comparative study finds at least two geographic areas within Taiwan in which features of prosody and intonation cluster. One is southwestern Taiwan, including Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, and Rukai, which share features including a lack of glide-vowel contrasts and variability of initial H vs. L elements in certain prosodic domains. The other is eastern Taiwan, including Amis, Kavalan, and Puyuma, which share features including suppression of non-IP-final pitch accents, alternations between ultimate and pre-ultimate F0 peaks across intonational contours, and interactions between glottal stop epenthesis and intonational phonology.

Nesta pesquisa, foi realizada uma análise fonético-perceptiva multimodal da entoação de enunciados assertivos, interrogativos totais do tipo eco, exclamativos e interrogativos parciais no português do Brasil. O objetivo desta tese é analisar o reconhecimento perceptivo auditivo e visual desses quatro tipos de enunciados com seus valores pragmáticos específicos. Dez falantes (cinco homens e cinco mulheres) do Rio de Janeiro foram gravados e filmados. Este estudo é dividido em três etapas. Na primeira, a produção dos quatro tipos de enunciados é descrita tanto acusticamente, em relação aos parâmetros de F0, intensidade e duração, quanto
visualmente, em termos de Unidades de Ação. Os resultados da análise da produção indicam que há pistas acústicas e visuais que distinguem esses significados pragmáticos manifestados pela entoação. O parâmetro acústico de F0 e, secundariamente, o de intensidade, são os que discriminam mais claramente os quatro contornos entonacionais. No que se refere aos gestos faciais, verificamos que, enquanto movimentos de cabeça e piscar dos olhos foram encontrados para a asserção, movimentos de cabeça e de sobrancelha foram constatados na produção da questão parcial, e movimentos de cabeça, sobrancelha e levantamento dos lábios na da exclamação. Nas duas etapas seguintes de avaliação perceptiva, foram aplicados sete experimentos de percepção, reunindo um total de duzentos e noventa e cinco ouvintes. Na segunda etapa, cinco experimentos de reconhecimento perceptivo audiovisual foram aplicados a um grupo de duzentos e cinquenta e um ouvintes, através da apresentação dos estímulos em três modalidades: somente áudio (A), somente vídeo (V) e áudio combinado com vídeo (AV). Os testes perceptivos audiovisuais mostraram que os quatro tipos de enunciado são identificados nas modalidades audiovisual (AV), auditiva (A) e visual (V), com exceção da questão-eco nessa última modalidade, devido ao fato desse tipo de enunciado não ter apresentado em nossos dados gestos faciais prototípicos, o que diferencia nossos resultados daqueles encontrados na literatura de prosódia audiovisual. Além disso, foi constatado que o canal visual não só atua de forma integrada na percepção da entoação de asserções, perguntas e exclamações, como também contribui de maneira mais efetiva em contextos com fala ambígua e com áudio degradado. Na terceira etapa, foram elaborados dois experimentos de reconhecimento perceptivo, aplicados a um grupo de quarenta e quatro ouvintes, para verificar os correlatos acústico-perceptivos característicos dos quatro padrões, por meio da técnica de manipulação da curva de frequência fundamental. A identificação perceptiva dos estímulos com F0 manipulada nos permitiu concluir que a oposição entre os enunciados se dá na região nuclear dos contornos entonacionais. As seguintes características fonéticas da sílaba tônica nuclear se mostraram relevantes perceptivamente para os ouvintes no reconhecimento do valor funcional dos padrões melódicos: movimento descendente de F0 na asserção e na questão parcial, movimento ascendente de F0 na questão-eco e movimento ascendente de F0 de baixa amplitude na da exclamação. Associado ao tipo de movimento de F0, o padrão rítmico (comportamento conjunto da intensidade e da duração) também contribui para o reconhecimento da distinção dos quatro tipos de enunciados.

Variability has been one of the major challenges for both theoretical understanding and computer synthesis of speech prosody. In this paper we show that economical representation of variability is the key to effective modeling of prosody. Specifically, we report the development of PENTAtrainer -A trainable yet deterministic prosody synthesizer based on an articulatory-functional view of speech. We show with testing results on Thai, Mandarin and English that it is possible to achieve high-accuracy predictive synthesis of fundamental frequency contours with very small sets of parameters obtained through stochastic learning from real speech data. The first key component of this system is syllable-synchronized sequential target approximation -implemented as the qTA model, which is designed to simulate, for each tonal unit, a wide range of contextual variability with a single invariant target. The second key component is the automatic learning of function-specific targets through stochastic global optimization, guided by a layered pseudo-hierarchical functional annotation scheme, which requires the manual labeling of only the temporal domains of the functional units. The results in terms of synthesis accuracy demonstrate that effective modeling of the contextual variability is the key also to effective modeling of function-related variability. Additionally, we show that, being both theory-based and trainable (hence datadriven), computational systems like PENTAtrainer can serve as an effective modeling tool in basic research, with which the level of falsifiability in theory testing can be raised, and also a closer link between basic and applied research in speech science can be developed.

La entonación paralingüística (que incluye las entonaciones "emocional", "de foco" y "de cortesía") ha sido la gran olvidada en los estudios sobre entonación en nuestro país. Se trata, indudablemente, del fenómeno prosódico más relevante en la comunicación interpersonal, desde la perspectiva pragmática, por su fuerte dependencia del contexto comunicativo. En este trabajo, proponemos una nueva perspectiva de la "entonación emocional", precisando su carácter parcialmente convencional.

Digital communication technologies have greatly influenced and expanded the way humans interact. The progress of information technology has opened wider opportunities for communication. Social networks have become the modern-day social communities connecting people from different parts of the globe, sharing images and videos on these platforms. By creating virtual communities, digital communication has expanded the scope of communication eliminating barriers. We aim to make further progress in this arena by describing an image in the form of audio to visually impaired people. A certain section of differently abled people is unfortunately isolated from this world. Inorder to combat this issue we have come up with a system that describes an image shown in the form of plain text using an encoder-decoder architecture and is integrated with an end-to-end lexical articulator which produces a vocal description of the given image.

In sign languages, the functions of intonation are performed by facial expression and head movements (e.g., Sandler 1999; Dachkovsky et al. 2013). For example, in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) squinted eyes and forward head position systematically mark relative clauses (Dachkovsky & Sandler 2009).  Yet, this consistent intonational marking is characteristic of the younger signers’ but not of the older signers’ signing. This suggests that these intonational components developed over time and poses questions about their emergence and development. The present study investigates the grammaticalization of forward head movement and squinted eyes by tracking the changes of intonational marking across three generations of ISL signers.  The study demonstrates that these signals begin as pragmatic or, more specifically, as information structuring devices, and are transformed by a grammaticalization process into relative clause construction markers.

Sintagmatic stress: description and functions. Sintagmatic stress and phonic-group. Functions of intonation. The integrative and delimitation function. Oral comprehension and sintagmatic stress. Reading as a hearing phenomenon: repercussions on reading comprehension. Sintagmatic stress acquisition and oral comprehension in a second language. Sintagmatic stress and automatic speech recognition.

This article analyses phonetic variation among young people who have learned a minority language in immersion schooling as part of revitalisation measures. Such speakers are increasingly referred to as ‘new speakers’ in an expanding body of literature. The variable phonetic features analysed are vowels, laterals, and intonation in the speech of new Gaelic speakers from Glasgow and the Isle of Lewis. Results support previous work suggesting that new speakers will sound different from ‘traditional speakers’. These results are discussed in terms of language contact, modes of acquisition in re- vitalisation situations, and the differing perceptions and ideologies surrounding how new speakers use Gaelic. The data also necessitate an examination of some of the assumptions in sociolinguistic models of change and their applicability to contexts of rapid social evolution.

No es propósito de este trabajo caracterizar las propiedades fónicas de los focos, sino explorar, y poco más, las complejas relaciones que se dan entre el foco prosódico y el foco sintáctico. Se trata sólo de un trabajo introductorio, que en su parte principal considera los resultados de aplicar un cuestionario a un grupo de informantes, a la vista de los ejemplos que se suelen aducir en la bibliografía gramatical. 1

The aims of my contribution are both descriptive and theoretical. I first sketch the prosodic configuration of Wolof, the dominant language in Senegal, and give an account of the phonetic expression of distinctive, culminative, delimitative and rhythmic functions based on examples from the literature and from my own empirical data from a group of speakers in Dakar. After contrasting these pairs of function and phonetic expression with the phonology of French as it is described in some parts of the literature, I proceed to a discussion of examples of French performed by the same speakers and show some effects of prosodic patterns of Wolof in these examples. The most salient characteristics of French spoken with a strong competence in Wolof can be attributed to rhythmicity and prominence. Speakers avoid complex syllables and realize high tonal targets associated with word-initial syllables. Phonological phrases are delimited only by boundary tones and do not interact with processes like liaison or final lengthening. In conclusion, I suggest that prosodic phonology should not insist on the applicability of the same formal principles across all prosodic domains, but rather look for principles of different functional tasks separately and find rules of alignment between them. The best empirical fields for this kind of research are multilingual communities with linguistic traditions of great structural diversity.

Standard Finland Swedish is often described as having Finnish-like intonation, with characteristic falling pitch accents. In this study, it is found that the falling pitch accent occurs with varying degrees of frequency in different Finland Swedish dialects, being most frequent in the dialects that have had the greatest amount of contact with Finnish, and less frequent (though in many cases still part of the intonational system) elsewhere.

The Birmingham accent, also known as Brummie, enjoys a very bad reputation in Great Britain. It was suggested that its intonation is responsible for the stigma in the first place (How to speak Brummie, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A496352, 2001). Since Birmingham intonation differs from standard British intonation, and because intonation is indeed pragmatically meaningful for the perception of speech, two experiments at Adam Mickiewicz University were carried out to verify the hypothesis. The first one was to answer if Brummie is indeed disfavoured when compared to other dialects. The subjects listened to three Brummie speakers and three speakers of different accents of English, and rated the perceived attractiveness, friendliness and intelligence of the recordings on a 5-point Likert scale. The accent, as expected, was deemed the least attractive and intelligent. The second, core part of the experiment investigated to what extent intonation is responsible for this bad perception of Brummie speech. This time, the subjects were to listen to two versions of the speech sample of a given accent. The first version contained only intonation (the speech was unintelligible), and the second one included only segmentals (intonation was removed from the signal). The modifications were made using the methodology of Van Bezooijen and Gooskens (J Lang Soc Psychol 18(1):31–48, 1999) in PRAAT. The results of the two versions of each recording were then compared. On the whole, it turned out that Brummie intonation is indeed seen more negatively than RP intonation.

This paper investigates the intonation of topics and focus in Argentinean Porteño. We have found that whereas tonal alignment is phonetically conditioned, pitch height and duration constitute the main cues to express various types of focus in declarative and interrogative sentences; at least four intonational
categories seem to be used by our speakers and the relevance of a register feature is discussed. As for topics, they are marked by special tunes that depend on the type of sentence; in particular, the topic tune in questions is the opposite of those found in declaratives.

The current surge of interest in studies on intonation, in areas ranging from L2 teaching to child language acquisition, finally mirrors the crucial role played by intonation in the whole of human communication through language. In studies on non-native linguistic proficiency, a ‘foreign intonation’ appears as the last stronghold of a non-native accent, consisting in the use, in a second language, of intonation patterns belonging to the first language of the learner. The use of a foreign intonation does not, however, only characterise an accent. Intonation patterns convey specific meanings in each language, and the correspondence between these meanings and specific pitch patterns is often as arbitrary as the correspondence between words and their meanings. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a basis for the comparison of the intonation patterns of (European) Portuguese and (British) English, highlighting potential areas of difficulty for speakers of each of these languages in learning the other, and the reasons for these difficulties. Second, to give support to the view, current in L2 studies, that the learning of L2 intonation cannot be taken for granted, if breakdown in native to non-native spoken communication is to be avoided.

Listeners' comprehension of phrase final rising pitch on declarative utterances, or uptalk, was examined to test the hypothesis that prolongations might differentiate conflicting functions of rising pitch. In Experiment 1 we found that listeners rated prolongations as indicating more speaker uncertainty, but that rising pitch was unrelated to ratings. In Experiment 2 we found that prolongations interacted with rising pitch when listeners monitored for words in the subsequent utterance. Words preceded by prolonged uptalk were monitored faster than words preceded by non-prolonged uptalk. In Experiment 3 we found that the interaction between rising pitch and prolongations depended on listeners' beliefs about speakers' mental states. Results support the theory that temporal and situational context are important in determining intonational meaning.

During the last 30 years, research in language, gender, and sexism have witnessed a considerable boom in sociolinguistics because of its controversial debates. Therefore, our attention was drawn for the reasons behind the endeavour. This paper"s purpose is twofold. First, it seeks to account for the linguistic performance divergences between English speaking men and women through looking at four major theories: the Deficit, the Dominance, the Difference, and the Social Constructionist theory. Subsequently, it will shed light on those sociolinguistic differences by stressing some examples such as hedges, minimal responses, intonation, and interruptions. Second, it will highlight (c)overt sexism issues in language by paying particular attention at some cases such as semantic derogations, use of titles, and syntactic asymmetry. Eventually, the second part aims at putting forward some alternatives to avoid sexism.