HSCR 2021

This volume contains studies presented at the 4th International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research (HSCR 2021). The series of workshops was initiated in Dresden in 2015. The current workshop took place in Prague at the Institute of Phonetics, Charles University, amid the everchanging pandemic circumstances for the first time in a hybrid form. There are nine contributions, written by 12 authors from six countries. The contributions analyze the contextual background of particular personalities or investigate how specific research practices developed over time. Moreover, each contribution demonstrates a significant connection between various aspects of speech communication research and the wider social context. A special theme of this workshop was the link in linguistic signs between the form (sound) and the meaning (sense). The phonetic endeavour was often claimed to concern only the form, while meaning was delegated to someone else. This is not only one-sided, but also difficult to integrate into the large body of scientific knowledge, as the opening keynote emphasized.