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 and has 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 ("habilitation") 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).
Software
editDaniel 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.
Organisation
editIn 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
Selected Publications
editTheses
edit- 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).
Books
edit- 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))