Talk by Janika Kunzmann (GU)

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
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

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
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)

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
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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Talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The Limits of Umlaut in Sinhala: Matching domains across the syntax, morphology, and phonology (joint work with Paula Fenger, Leipzig University) Date: May 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk we study the patterns of verbal umlaut in the Indo-Aryan language Sinhala (spoken in Sri Lanka), which seems to be constrained by an intricate combination of (i) lexical, (ii) morphosyntactic, and (iii) phonological factors. We study this phenomenon and show that it can be used as a window into the morphological makeup of complex words. In particular, we defend  the following claims: 1. Contrary to some claims in the literature (see e.g. Garland 2005), we argue that the limits of umlaut show that Sinhala verb morphology is, underlyingly, concatenative and in order to describe where umlaut appears and where it doesn’t, we need to refer to the notion of the morpheme. 2....
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Talk by Stefan Baumann (IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne)

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Stefan Baumann (IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne). Title: Are highlighted words always informative? On the complex relationship between prosodic prominence and meaning Date: Wednesday, 11.05.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (in addition, we will stream the talk via Zoom, see below) Abstract: When speakers communicate with each other, relevant parts of an utterance may either be actively highlighted through prosodic and syntactic means, or they are informative in themselves, such as novel or important discourse topics and uncommon words. As a result of both prosodic and syntactic highlighting and semantic-pragmatic informativeness, listeners perceive certain elements of an utterance as more or less prominent. The talk will examine the basic assumption that there is a direct correspondence between the two levels, such that (prosodically) highlighted elements should at the same time be more informative, and vice versa. This relationship has been shown to be much more complex, however, given the multidimensionality...
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