Blurb:

In this chapter we discuss the study of phonology (of speech, and other semiotic resources with sound as expression plane, such as music) within the environments of contemporary software resources, including a software platform currently under development. These software tools enable researchers and teachers to readily access the sound signal and create a variety of annotations of such data, and to store, search, process and display the data and their analyses. Such resources thus make possible the correlation, in both the database and interface, of phonetic, phonological, lexicogrammatical, semantic and contextual analyses within different metafunctions, at different ranks and so on. The present chapter is not a review of software applications as such, but rather a discussion of some of the affordances of and issues in the development and use of digital technologies (for a review of software resources relevant to systemic scholars see O’Donnell and Bateman, 2005).