Here are the pants I promised you.

Way back when, long, long ago, I wrote a post about pants. The pants post. Actually, the “Pants!” post. Where I talked about the word pants, how I like saying “pants”, how pants is a funny word. And I, therein, made a promise to do some acoustic pants analysis:

When discussing pants, it’s also important to pronounce pants properly. I produce pants with very strong aspiration on the [p]. There seems to be a bit of difference in the vowel, too. I’ll plan to make some recordings so that I can do a bit of pants analysis.

It’s taken me a bit of time to get back to you with the promised pants. I hadn’t figured out a great way to incorporate soundfiles into my posts. And for a post on the particulars of pants production, one really neads to have an accompanying pants soundfile. Thanks to a new WordPress feature, I am now easily able to embed soundfiles. Even pants soundfiles. Especially pants soundfiles. I now promise you to include more pants soundfiles than ever before. This blog can become known as the one with pants.

So, here are the pants I promised you. The image below shows a screenshot of the soundfile pair_of_pants.wav displayed in praat, which I have additionally marked up a bit with arrows and such. The file pair_of_pants.wav contains two productions of the word pants, one “normal,” and one “funny.” (Before I tell you which is which, have a listen, and you be the judge. Listen to the pants yourself.)

Streamed version of pair_of_pants.mp3:

pair_of_pants.wav soundfile (can be downloaded):

Figure 1: pair_of_pants.wav with accompanying Praat TextGrid, and some arrows and stuff

The two productions of pants were spoken by a female native speaker of American English who was wearing pajama pants at the time of the recording. Each of the two versions of pants is of a similar length (roughly .7 seconds from the onset of the [p] burst), and produced in citation form with a similar f0 contour (H* L-L% in ToBI terms).

Okay, I have to run off to class now, without finishing my pants analysis. I hate to leave you hanging with my pants half done, but there it is. More indepth pants analysis is coming soon…