Autor: Anna Pressler

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...

We are happy to announce a talk by Barış Kabak in the Phonology Colloquium (jointly organised by Angela Grimm & Frank Kügler). Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday November 19th Time: 16-18 ct. Title: Mismatches within, across and beyond prosody  ...

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...

We are happy to announce a talk by Janika Kunzmann in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday November 5th Time: 17-18 st. Title: On the tonal system of Mbum - Insights from fieldwork in Cameroon Abstract:  This talk presents preliminary insights from an ongoing study of the tonal system of Mbum, a Cameroon- Ubangian language spoken in Cameroon. Drawing on data collected through both on-site and remote fieldwork conducted as part of a doctoral project in descriptive linguistics, the presentation examines key features of Mbum’s tonal system, including a two-level tonal contrast, the presence of various toneless elements, polarity rules, and instances of grammatical tone, as well as how these phenomena are approached in this study. The talk further discusses the challenges and strategies involved in preparing and organizing fieldwork data from scratch for tonal analysis. Overall, it aims to offer a window into the methods, approaches, and preliminary findings that shape a fieldwork-based tonal study of a little-documented and hardly accessible...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jonas Grünke in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: Wednesday July 16th Time: 16-18 ct Title: When intonation meets intonation: Evidence from Catalan-Spanish bilingualism and other contact settings Abstract:  Language contact often leads to mutual influence, with prosody frequently said to be particularly susceptible to such effects. However, detailed studies on prosodic transfer remain relatively scarce. In this talk, I examine intonational influence between Catalan and Spanish, showing how both languages shape each other prosodically in bilingual speakers. I argue that current patterns of variation can only be understood when taking into account language dominance in these speakers’ repertoires. In addition to this case study, I will discuss further examples of prosodic contact effects in minority and heritage languages (e.g., Judeo-Spanish) as well as in third language acquisition (L3 French), aiming to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of prosody in multilingual settings....