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 the adjective position. She proposes requirements for a speech model that captures the variability in the positioning of these adjectives.
