Talk by Cornelia Ebert (Frankfurt) and Markus Steinbach (Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (Frankfurt) and Markus Steinbach (Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 7, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: The semantics of semi-conventionalized lexical depictions in spoken and sign languages Abstract: Typological research has shown that many unrelated spoken languages have ideophones such as English helter-skelter or German plitsch-platsch. Ideophones form a special class of words which are used in specific registers (often vivid narrative contexts) and can be defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). They have been argued to be depictive items which establish an iconic relationship of the form of an ideophone (including the utterance of it) and its meaning, which lies in the domain of sensory imagery encoding information about movement, sound, sentiment or mental state. In addition, ideophones typically contribute...
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Talk by Marieke Einfeldt (University of Konstanz)

We are happy to announce a talk by Marieke Einfeldt (Konstanz) in the Phonology Colloquium. Room: IG 4.301 Date: November 06, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Differences of prenuclear accents and stops in the two varieties of Zurich German speakers: A within speaker comparison” Abstract: While research on the two languages of bilingual speakers has already received a lot of attention (see e.g., Chang, 2021 for an overview), research on the two varieties of bilectal speakers is still scarce (Kupisch et al., 2023). I will present findings from the analyses of two closely related Swiss German varieties (Zurich German and Swiss Standard German) spoken by the same speakers and compare them to a Standard German control group. We focused on segmental (VOT and closure duration) and prosodic (prenuclear accents) properties that have the potential to differ in the dialectal and in the standard realizations: Zurich German stops have been reported to differ based on closure duration, while Standard German stops are differentiated based on VOT (Ladd &...
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