Talk by Katharina Zahner-Ritter (Trier University)

We are happy to announce a talk by Katharina Zahner-Ritter (Trier University) in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: January 31, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Accounting for the dynamics in the L2 acquisition of intonation: Cross-linguistic influence, proficiency, and individual variation Abstract: Learning a foreign language (L2) is a challenge for learners, especially when it comes to intonation and timing. Even advanced learners have been shown to differ from native (L1) speakers with respect to pitch accent placement or pitch accent type. Comparatively fewer studies have focused on the fine phonetic detail of intonational patterns in the L2, e.g., alignment, scaling, or the shape of contour. In the talk, I will present data from different experiments that focus on the dynamics in the L2 acquisition of fine phonetic detail. One study targets the acquisition of tonal alignment configurations in L2 German, testing learners of tone- and non-tone languages in an imitation paradigm. Another study concentrates on the...
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Talk by Candy Adusei (Stuttgart University)

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Candy Adusei (Stuttgart University) on "Relative Clause Attachment and Prosodic Phrasing in Akan Twi and English" on Wednesday, 10.01.2024, from 16-18 ct. Abstract: Ample research has been conducted on the intricacies of attachment preferences which are caused by ambiguity when the head noun of the relative clause to which it is attached is complex, exemplified in the sentence: The servant of the actress who shot the man is here. This has given rise to the high attachment (where the parser attaches the relative clause to the initial noun, ‘the servant’), versus the low attachment (where the relative clause is attached to the most recent noun, the actress’) debate. Different languages have been shown to prefer different attachments for various reasons. One of such theories which attempt to account for this variation is Fodor (2002)’s Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, which explains that attachment resolution is affected by the default prosodic phrasing...
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Talk by Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken) in the Phonology Colloqium

We are happy to announce a talk by Bernd Möbius in the Phonology Colloqium on Wednesday, 13.12.2023, 16-18 ct. in IG 4.301. Title: Information Density and Phonetic Variation. Abstract: In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit's negative log probability in a given context). The main hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between information density and phonetic encoding. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant trajectories, stop consonant voicing, syllable duration, and vowel space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries, in the statistical...
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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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