Talk by Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz ZAS, Berlin)

We are happy to announce the next talk by Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz ZAS, Berlin) in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Towards a typology of prosody-segment interaction: The case of tone-driven epenthesis Date: Wednesday, 22.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: IG 4.301 in person, if necessary with additional Zoom If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: This talk presents on an oft-neglected topic in phonological typology: the interaction between segments and prosody (e.g. pitch/tone/intonation/etc.). Some prosody-segment interactions are commonly found (e.g. tone lowering with depressor consonants) and others are known to be quite rare (e.g. tone height dependent on vowel height), but in general its empirical landscape has not been firmly established. This talk argues that we must add to this typology a novel process we call ‘tone-driven epenthesis’, defined as the phonological insertion of a vowel in order to host a tone (e.g. a high pitch target). We show evidence for tone-driven epenthesis in two African languages Wamey (Tenda, Niger-Congo: Senegal)...
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Talk by Kevin Tang (HHU Düsseldorf)

We are happy to announce the next talk by Kevin Tang (HHU Düsseldorf) in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Sentence prosody leaks into the lexicon: evidence from Mandarin Chinese Date: Wednesday, 15.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: IG 4.301 in person, if necessary with additional Zoom If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: While the precise extent to which phrasal phonology interacts with word-level phonology is a long-standing issue, it is generally assumed that lexical phonology is at least somewhat independent of phrasal phonology, including intonation. Exemplar theory complicates this division, as phonetically detailed exemplars encode context-dependent prosody in the lexical representation (Pierrehumbert 2016). In line with this prediction, some evidence for the lexical encoding of intonation has been found in German and English, languages in which pitch accents are assigned at the phrasal level (Schweitzer et al. 2015). Schweitzer et al. showed that f0 contours are more stable in predictable collocations than in unpredictable collocations, suggesting a possible lexicalization of intonation. The current study probes this issue in Mandarin...
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Talk by Fatima Hamlaoui (University of Toronto)

We are happy to announce a talk by Fatima Hamlaoui in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Prosodic Transfer in Contact Varieties: Vocative calls in Metropolitan and in Basaá-Cameroonian French Date: Wednesday, 01.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: Hybrid - Zoom and IG 4.301 If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: The effect of context on the prosody of vocative calls has been a topic of growing interest (a.o., Borràs-Comes et al. 2015, Huttenlauch et al. 2016, Arvaniti et al. 2016, Kubozono & Mizoguchi 2019). In Metropolitan French, just as in a variety of intonation languages, sweet and friendly contexts are typically associated with a chanting contour, while urgent contexts have been described to elicit a rising-falling contour (a.o., Ladd 2008, Jun & Fougeron 1995, Fagyal 1997, Delais-Roussarie et al. 2015, Di Cristo 2016). Little is known however as to the extent of this form-meaning association and the effect of context on the prosodic realization of the different contours. What is also...
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Talk by Stefan Baumann (IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne)

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Stefan Baumann (IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne). Title: Are highlighted words always informative? On the complex relationship between prosodic prominence and meaning Date: Wednesday, 11.05.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (in addition, we will stream the talk via Zoom, see below) Abstract: When speakers communicate with each other, relevant parts of an utterance may either be actively highlighted through prosodic and syntactic means, or they are informative in themselves, such as novel or important discourse topics and uncommon words. As a result of both prosodic and syntactic highlighting and semantic-pragmatic informativeness, listeners perceive certain elements of an utterance as more or less prominent. The talk will examine the basic assumption that there is a direct correspondence between the two levels, such that (prosodically) highlighted elements should at the same time be more informative, and vice versa. This relationship has been shown to be much more complex, however, given the...
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