Talk by Maya Cortez (Graz University) in the Phonology Colloquium

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Maya Cortez (Graz University) Title: Intonating Pragmatically Diverse Rising Declaratives. Evidence from a German Production Experiment Date: Wednesday, 28.10.2026 Time: 16:30-18:00 (note: we will start 15 min later than usual) Location: on ZOOM; possibility to meet in the seminar room (IG 4.301) If you are registered in Olat you'll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom and do not have the link yet, please send an email to: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de...
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Talk by Christoph Bracks (GU, Southeast Asia Studies)

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 Totoli 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

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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