Category: Phonology

We are very happy to announce the next talk in our phonology colloquium this term. Christiane Ulbrich (U Konstanz) will talk about "Speech accommodation in L2" The talk will take place online, on Zoom. Please register beforehand (Kuegler@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom! Christine Ulbrich: Title: Speech accommodation in L2 Time: 09. December 2020, 4 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I am presenting the results of a series of experiments on speech accommodation to address two issues. (i) Even though research has dealt with such accommodation effects since the 1970s, the mechanisms behind the process(es) are still not very well understood. Some believe that accommodation is a dynamic process that speakers strategically apply to gain social approval and to attain communicational efficiency. Others proposes accommodation to be largely automatic. The question is how these two mechanisms can be observed in non-native speech. In other words, provided that a desire of non-native speakers to archive a high level of intelligibility can be assumed, does...

Dear colleagues, we are very happy to announce the next talk in our phonology colloquium this term. Eva Zimmermann (U Leipzig) will talk about "Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions". The talk will take place online. Title: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions Time: 02. December 2020, 4 pm ct Place: Zoom Abstract below: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions The assumption of Gradient Symbolic Representations that phonological elements can have different degrees of activity (Smolensky and Goldrick, 2016; Rosen, 2016; Zimmermann, 2018, 2019) allows a unified explanation for the typology of phonological exceptions. Exceptional (non)triggers and (non)undergoers of otherwise regular phonological processes are predicted from gradient constraint violations: The activation of a phonological element in an underlying morpheme representation determines 1) how much the element is preserved by faithfulness constraints and 2) how much it is visible for markedness constraints. I argue that this simple mechanism predicts the attested typology of phonological exceptions and that the predictions made...