LAPSyD is a database created by Ian Maddieson
in collaboration with the Laboratoire Dynamique de Langage (DDL) in
Lyon.
The origin of LAPSyD is to be found in the UPSID database, described and
used in Maddieson (1984) and other publications. Data
originally from UPSID was considerably expanded in both the number of languages
covered and the depth of information on each language for contributions to the World Atlas of Language Structures (
Maddieson 2005, 2011) with support from the US National Science Foundation (project
# 0345784). Since 2006 this work has continued at the University of
New Mexico in Albuquerque where Ian Maddieson is
Adjunct Research Professor (hence the acronym LAPSyD — Lyon-Albuquerque
Phonological Systems Database). All
data is verified by Maddieson before being published
in LAPSyD.
The UPSID database was implemented in a manipulable
form at the DDL during the 1990’s by Egidio Marsico
and Christian Fressard under
the name CaSSoPi (link:
http://www.ddl.cnrs.fr/Equipes/Index.asp?Action=Edit&Langue=FR&Equipe=3&Page=Action&ActionNum=22
) and comparisons carried out between current phonological systems and those
reconstructed by historical linguists for proto-languages using another DDL
database, BDProto (see Marsico
et al 2004, Marsico 1999, Coupé et al 2009 for some
reports on these projects). CaSSoPi provided some of
the conceptual framework for LAPSyD.
LAPSyD itself is the product of a Franco-American partnership. It was conceived
in 2009 with support from the Collegium
de Lyon (link:
http://www.collegium-lyon.fr/ ), an
international multidisciplinary Institute for Advanced Study focusing on social
sciences, which provided a Fellowship to Ian Maddieson
for a five-month working visit to Lyon. The database is programmed and hosted
at the Laboratoire Dynamique de
Langage (DDL) (link:
http://www.ddl.cnrs.fr/presentation/index.asp?Langue=FR&Page=Objectifs
), a research
laboratory funded by the CNRS and affiliated with the University of Lyon-2. The
mission of the DDL is to explore the relationship between the diversity of the
thousands of languages currently spoken around the world and the universal
nature of the human language capacity. The programmer for the database at the
DDL is Sébastien Flavier. Additional input has been
provided by Egidio Marsico,
François Pellegrino and Christophe Coupé.
LAPSyD was publically launched in August 2013 at the Interspeech conference in Lyon (Maddieson
et al 2013).
References
Coupé, Christophe, Egidio Marsico, & François Pellegrino. 2009. Structural
complexity of phonological systems. In Approaches
to Phonological Complexity, edited by Pellegrino, François, Egidio Marsico, Ioana Chitoran
& Christophe Coupé. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin:
141–170
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of Sounds (Cambridge studies in
speech science and communication). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Maddieson, Ian.
2005. Chapters with accompanying maps in World
Atlas of Language Structures, edited by Martin Haspelmath,
Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie,
Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York. On-line version since 2011,
http://wals.info/
Maddieson Ian, Sébastien
Flavier, Egidio Marsico, Christophe Coupé &
François Pellegrino. 2013. LAPSyD: Lyon-Albuquerque Phonological Systems Database. In Proceedings
of Interspeech 2013, Lyon, 25-29 August 2013.
Marsico, Egidio, I. Maddieson, Christophe Coupé & François Pellegrino.
2004. Investigating the 'hidden' structure of phonological systems In
Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of
the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 256-267.
Marsico, Egidio. 1999. What
can a database of proto-languages tell us about the last 10,000 years of sound
changes? In Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (San
Francisco, August 1-7 1999). Edited by John J. Ohala et al. University of California, Berkeley.