We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Kathleen Jepson (LMU München) on Wednesday, 29.11.2023, from 16-18 in IG 4.301.
Abstract:
Prosody often encodes focus and givenness at the utterance level. Within noun phrases
(NPs), languages use phonological prosodic means such as accenting focused and new
information, and deaccenting given information, as well as phonetic prosodic cues such as
relative pitch height and alignment, and variation in intensity. Some languages, however, do
not mark focus within NPs prosodically, or may have a number of other mechanisms to do
the task such as syntactic movement or morphological markers.
This talk is concerned with how focus and givenness are realised within NPs in Djambarrpuyŋu,
an Australian Indigenous language. Like many Australian languages, Djambarrpuyŋu allows
free word order at the utterance-level and within NPs, and additionally permits discontinuous
nominal constituents in which the noun and modifiers occur distributed throughout the clause. In other Australian languages, the variability is found to be constrained by information
structure both at the utterance...