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 Alice Turk (University of Edinburgh)

Title: The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and Prosodic Structure. Date: Wednesday, 14.12.2022 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 Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and Prosodic Structure In this talk, I review the claims of the Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis in speech production.  The Smooth Signal Redundancy view hypothesizes that speakers plan the complementarity of language redundancy (recognition likelihood based on lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic factors as well as real world knowledge) and acoustic redundancy (recognition likelihood based on acoustic salience) in order to achieve a smooth signal redundancy profile (even recognition likelihood of all elements in an utterance).  I discuss evidence that speakers control signal redundancy through the manipulation of planned prosodic structure, which includes both prominence and constituent structure. This evidence suggests that the Smooth...
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Talk by Janika Kunzmann (GU)

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janika Kunzmann (GU). Title: Describing an Understudied Language of Northern Cameroon: Prominent Phonetic and Phonological Features of Mbum (Adamawa) Date: Wednesday, 07.12.2022 Time: 16-18 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 Describing an Understudied Language of Northern Cameroon: Prominent Phonetic and Phonological Features of Mbum (Adamawa) Mbum is a Kebi-Benue language classified by Boyd (1989) to be part of the Adamawa family. Like many languages of this group, which is highly disputed in its internal classification (cf. Kleinewillinghöfer 2014), Mbum lacks a detailed phonological description. Given this descriptive gap, my research aims to provide a general overview of the phonological and tonological characteristics of Mbum, as it is spoken today in Ngaoundéré and Nganha (Adamawa region, northern Cameroon)....
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Guest Professor Seunghun J. Lee (Christian University, Tokyo) July 2022

We welcome Seunghun J. Lee (Christian University, Tokyo) as this year's guest professor We are happy to welcome our guest Prof. Dr. Seunghun J. Lee from Christian University, Tokyo (https://sites.google.com/info.icu.ac.jp/linglab/home), who will be a guest researcher and lecturer at the Department of Linguistics in July 2022 as part of the International Campus Programme  (https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/56181581/International_Campus).    In the MA Programme "Linguistics", he will teach a course on "Prosody-Syntax-Interface: Theoretical and practical applications" - and everybody is welcome to participate. Registration for the course is via Olat. Here is the link to his class. https://qis.server.uni-frankfurt.de/qisserver/rds?state=verpublish&status=init&vmfile=no&publishid=334409&moduleCall=webInfo&publishConfFile=webInfo&publishSubDir=veranstaltung   Seunghun will be here the whole month of July. He is more than happy to discuss linguistic issues with colleagues and students. If anybody is interested in meeting him, just send him an email to s.lee@em.uni-frankfurt.de He can be reached in person in office IG 4.315....
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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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