Talk by Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College & Universität zu Köln)

We are happy to announce a talk by Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College & Universität zu Köln) in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Alina Gregori for the link.  Date: June 5, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct  Title: Spoken rhythms and drummed speech: Bidirectional iconicity at the crossroads of language and music Abstract: Language and music share many of the same raw ingredients, including pitch, rhythm, prosodic grouping, and timbre. This talk focuses on an underexplored aspect of the language-music connection: the iconic representation of one modality using the other, through onomatopoeia (music encoded as speech) and musical surrogate languages (speech encoded as music). In particular, I focus on drums to probe the bidirectional nature of this iconicity, what differences exist in the two directions of encoding, and what this tells us about the language and music faculties. All languages are capable of encoding percussive sounds through onomatopoeia, but certain linguistic and musical traditions...
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Talk by Kathleen Jepson (LMU München): Encoding focus within noun phrases in a free word order language

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...
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Talk by Lena Borise (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest)

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Lena Borise (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest)! Title: A unified prosodic account of two types of preverbal foci Date: Wednesday, 08.02.2023 Time: 16-18 ct. Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (if necessary, we will stream the talk via Zoom) If you are registered in Olat you'll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: The preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, common especially in verb-final languages, has been shown to result from different syntactic configurations cross-linguistically. Some immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement (e.g., in Hungarian; Bródy 1990; É. Kiss 1998), while other ones remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement (e.g., in Turkish; Şener 2010). We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in-situ ones, based...
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Talk by Frank Kügler (GU) as part of his Tenure-Track Evaluation Process

We are happy to announce a talk by Prof. Frank Kügler (Institute for Linguistics, GU), which takes place as a part of his tenure track evaluation process. Title: Prosodie in der Linguistik – multimodale Perspektiven auf Sprache Date: Friday, February 03, 2023 Time: 12:30-13:30 Uhr Room: IG 1.411 (in person) Access via Zoom: If you would like to participate via Zoom, please contact Anke Himmelreich for the link...
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