Obituary
Phonetica 1996:53:230-232
Sieb. G. Nooteboom
OTS, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Antonie Cohen
Antonie Cohen, who for many decades, both nationally
in the Netherlands and internationally, has played a stimulating and
provocative role in the field of phonetics, died in Bilthoven, the
Netherlands, on Sunday, 31 March 1996, from the effects of a heart attack,
at the age of 73.
Antonie Cohen spent most of the Second World War in
the United Kingdom as a voluntary soldier in the Dutch Princess Irene
Brigade. After the war he was a student of Daniel Jones in London from 1945
until 1948, when he obtained his BA. He then returned to the Netherlands,
where he obtained his doctorale in Amsterdam in 1952. His doctoral thesis
The Phonemes of English, written under the
supervision of Reichling, already showed Cohen's strong conviction that the
study of language and the study of speech are inseparable. This conviction
has been with him all his professional life. For him, this not only meant
that the study of speech should be firmly based in linguistics, but also
that the study of language should find its empirical basis in the study of
speech. After obtaining his doctoral degree, he gained a Rockefelier
Foundation Fellowship, taking him to the United Stites of America. Most of
his time there he spent at MIT working with young researchers such as Morris
Halle, Gunnar Fant, and Kenneth Stevens, and obtaining an intimate knowledge
of expermental methods in speech research that would serve him well in his
later career.
From 1959 to 1967 Antonie Cohen was a research
associate of the recently started Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in
Eindhoven, a jointly set-up of Philips Electronics and the Eindhoven
University of Technology. There he initiated a very successful and
well-known research unit. In 1967 Cohen was appointed Professor of English
at Utrecht University, and in 1972 he also became Professor of Phonetics at
the same umversity. From 1975 onwards, when the Utrecht Department of
Phonetics was formed, he left the English Department and fully concentrated
on phonetics, until his retirement in December 1987 at the age of 65. His
career is notable for at least three reasons: the originality and quality of
his own research, his wide-ranging influence as a teacher and thesis
supervisor, and his impressive accomplishments as an organizer and a
manager.
In 1959, when Antonie Cohen started his job at IPO,
most phonetics research in the world was focussed on the production and
perception of consonants and vowels within spoken syllables. Coben carved a
niche for himself and his collaborators by moving into a little explored
domain of experimental phonetics, the study of intonation. He approached
this area with two strong and fruitful convictions. One was that the study
of the linguistic functions of intonation sliould be postponed until one had
come to grips with intonational form. The other was that intonational form
could best be studied with the method of analysis-by-synthesis. This latter
conviction led to the developiment of an instrument called 'the Intonator'
as an important tool for intonation research. This was basically a channel
vocoder, in which the original course of pitch was replaced with an
artificial, stylized course of pitch. It enabled the researcher to go back
and forth between theoretical ideas about the perceptually relevant aspects
of intonation on the one hand and audible implementations of these ideas in
speech-like signals on the other hand [Cohen and 't Hart, 1967]. This
approach led to a 'Grammar of Dutch Intonation', which generates audible
standard versions of all and only the admissible speech melodies in the
language ['t Hart et al., 1990]. The same approach has been successfully
applied to the intonation of British English [Willems et al., 1988], Russian
[Odé, 1989], and German [Adriaens, 1991].
Although his investigations of intonation are
probably the best known of his scientific endeavours, Antonie Cohen's
contributions to linguistics and phonetics are far more numerous and
wide-ranging. He worked among other things on the morphonology of the Dutch
diminutive suffix, the phonology of Dutch, the structure of Dutch
orthography, the relevance of temporal cues to the perception of Dutch
phonemes, speech synthesis as a tool in the study of speech perception, the
relevance of gating techniques to speech analysis, errors of speech as a
window into the mental organization of speech, the use of shadowing as a
technique for studying the perceptual processing of speech, the central role
of the word as a processing unit in speech perception, the voiced-voiceless
distinction in Dutch plosives, the acoustic correlates of Dutch diphthongs,
formant discrimination in the auditory system, measuring listening
proficiency in second language teaching, and the development of an
artificial larynx with controllable pitch. He also was deeply interested in
the history of linguistics and phonetics, and stimulated and supervised the
writing of biographies of the Dutch linguist and scholar of English studies
Etsko Kruisinga [Van Essen, 1983] and of the English phonetician Daniel
Jones [Collins, 1988]. Stimulating and supervising younger people was second
nature to Antonie Cohen. He supervised about 30 doctoral theses, more than
any other dead or living Dutch phonetician. He was thoroughly convinced that
his real contribution to the world of science was not so much to be found in
his own publications, however numerous they are, but rather in the doctoral
theses and other publications of his students. To many of his students he
was not only a teacher and supervisor, but also a personal friend with whom
they kept warm relations long after they had found their own way in the
world. He will be remembered warmly by all his students.
Managing is getting things done through people.
Antonie Cohen was a great manager, partly because of his keen interest in
people, partly because of his extraordinary sense of responsibility, and
mostly because he just loved doing it. This is no place to name all the
public functions he ever had, but some of his achievements should be
mentioned. He was the initiator and first chairman of the extremely
successful Dutch Foundation of Linguistics (now the Foundation of Language,
Speech and Logic), that since its start in 1974 has thoroughly changed the
scene of linguistics in the Netherlands. He was also the chairman of a
national committee on Language and Speech Technology, which in 1984
published an influential report, Language and Speech Technology in the
Netherlands. He was the initiator, organizer, and first coordinator of a
successful and important national research programma on the Analysis and
Synthesis of Speech that ran from 1985 to 1990 [Van Heuven and Pols, 1993].
Many phoneticians in the world will remember Antonie Cohen as the chairman
of the Xth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, that took place in
Utrecht in 1983. I have heard it said many tines by many people from all
over the world that this was the best organized international congress of
phonetics they had ever witnessed. If this indeed was so, it was all due to
Antonie Cohen's enthusiasm, talent for management, and loving attention to
detail. Those who have worked with him will miss him immensely. References
Adriaens, L.M.H.: Ein Modell deutscher Intonation; Diss., Eindhoven (1991).
Cohen, A.: The phonemes of English; doctoral thesis, Amsterdam (1952).
Cohen, A.; Hart, J. 't: On the anatomy of intonation. Lingua 18:
177-192 (1967).
Hart, J. 't; Collier. R.; Cohen, A.: A perceptual study of intontation: an
experimental-phonetic approach to speech melody (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge 1990).
Odé, C.: Russian intonation: a perceptual description ; doctoral thesis,
Leyden (1989).
Van Essen, A.J.: E.Kruisinga: a chapter in the history of linguistics;
doctoral thesis, Utrecht (1983).
Van Heuven, V.J.; Pols, L.: Analysis and synthesis of speech (Mouton-de
Gruyter, Berlin (1993).
Willems, N; Collier, R.; Hart, J. ‘t: A synthesis scheme for British English
Intonation. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84: 1250-1261 (1988). |