Talk by Christoph Bracks (GU, Southeast Asia Studies)

by Anna Pressler Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Christoph Bracks in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday January 14th Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Phonetics, Segmental and Suprasegmental Phonology of Totol Abstract: This talk presents key aspects of the phonetics, phonology, and prosody of Totoli, an Austronesian language, based on a forthcoming Illustration of the IPA paper to appear in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA). As a novelty within the Illustration of the IPA genre, the paper places particular emphasis on prosody. Totoli exhibits several typologically unusual features for the region, including phonemic length contrasts in both vowels and consonants, as well as distinct allophonic realizations of /l/. These include, among other features, compensatory lengthening when in word-final position, which may give rise to potential triple-length contrasts. Furthermore, the prosodic systems of Austronesian languages remain comparatively understudied. Hence, the prosodic features observed in Totoli may offer a useful point of departure for further comparative research toward a more comprehensive understanding...
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Felicitas Kleber (Saarland University) in the Phonology Colloquium

by Anna Pressler Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Felicitas Kleber in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday December 3rd Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Acoustic cue reweighting in diachronic sound change Many diachronic sound changes are characterized by minimal changes at the subphonemic level and a slow, gradual progression throughout the speech communities. While generational vocalic changes along one articulatory-acoustic dimension (e.g. back vowel fronting and F2 raising) are well documented in the sociolinguistic literature, the reweighting of multiple subphonemic cues to consonants has only recently become the focus of laboratory phonological studies, e.g. on tonogenesis in Afrikaans and Korean where VOT is giving way to tonal contrasts. This talk focusses on the emergence of VOT as a cue to the voicing contrast in German regional varieties that were hitherto either signalled by closure duration alone or considered neutralized. These changes are very likely the result of dialect levelling, i.e. they come about through contact with standard German where VOT is the primary cue to this contrast. They nevertheless offer insights into...
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Talk by Alina Gregori (GU) in the Phonology colloquium

by Anna Pressler Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Alina Gregori in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday November 12th Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Individual strategies in multimodal hyperarticulation Abstract: Hyperarticulation refers to speakers adapting their articulation to the communicative needs of their interlocutor. Speakers enhance specific features to highlight certain elements or reduce others if the context allows (hypoarticulation). This has been found for acoustic features, and recently also for prosody-gesture interaction (Gregori & Kügler, under revision), licensed by focus and background contexts. These findings led to the conclusion that hyperarticulation is not a unimodal phenomenon but can be applied in multiple modalities. Following that finding, this study addresses whether individual speakers use hyperarticulation strategies similarly, if they prefer a strategy and if they combine them to highlight information in focus. Drawing on data from Gregori & Kügler (under revision), individual hyperarticulation is examined from a German conversational corpus. Results reveal that multimodal hyperarticulation is more stable than prosodic hyperarticulation is, as the...
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