Corinna Langer and Anna Pressler successfully defend their dissertations

By Nelli Kerezova Comment Closed
On June 26, 2026, two dissertation defenses were successfully held in the Phonology group. Corinna Langer defended her thesis entitled Focus and Prosody in Hungarian - investigating syntactically unmarked focus in the morning and Anna Pressler defended her thesis on Prosodic factors at the phrase level: the positioning of French adjectives in the afternoon. We warmly congratulate both for their achievement! Corinna Langers dissertation investigated two cases of focus marking in Hungarian where syntax cannot disambiguate the scope of focus. Using a combination of production and perception experiments, she finds that prosody does disambiguate focus scope in Hungarian contexts where syntax does not do so. She discusses her findings in light of existing syntax-prosody mapping approaches. Anna Presslers dissertation investigated the positioning of a set of french adjectives (pre- or postnominal) that do not have a syntactical or semantic preference for any position. In four empirical studies, she explored the influence of prosodic factors relative length and rhythmic alternation, which she found to influence...
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Talk by Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken) in the Phonology Colloqium

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
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

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
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...
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Talk by Lena Borise (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest)

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
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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