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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Talk by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University)

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University) Title: Exploring individual variability in prominence production Date: Wednesday, 02.11.2022 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 AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: Prosodic prominence is known to be multifaceted, encompassing a variety of cues related to timing, spectral properties and the F0 contour (Baumann & Winter 2018, Roessig et al 2022). It is therefore a reasonable assumption that speakers differ in which of these cues they prioritize in their prominence production. This has been shown to be true, for example, in the case of focus-marking (Cangemi et al. 2015). In this talk, I will present an exploratory analysis of inter-speaker variability in the prosodic encoding of information status in German, looking at several prominence cues...
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Talk by Seunghun J. Lee (International Christian University, Tokyo / University of Venda, South Africa)

We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Seunghun J. Lee Title: A modular theory of the relation between syntactic and phonological constituency Date: Wednesday, 29.06.2022 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 Abstract: In this talk, we present a proposal about how syntactic constituents and phonological constituents are related. This modular account explain mismatches between syntactic and phonological/prosodic constituency by re-construing Match constraints (Selkirk 2011) as spell-out constraints that relate the output representation of the morphosyntax to the input representation for the phonology. In the phonology per se, a novel class of prosodic structure faithfulness constraints interacts with prosodic structure markedness constraints to produce further constituency mismatches in the output phonological representation. Main data in this talk comes from H tone spreading...
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Talk by Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz ZAS, Berlin)

We are happy to announce the next talk by Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz ZAS, Berlin) in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Towards a typology of prosody-segment interaction: The case of tone-driven epenthesis Date: Wednesday, 22.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: IG 4.301 in person, if necessary with additional Zoom If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: This talk presents on an oft-neglected topic in phonological typology: the interaction between segments and prosody (e.g. pitch/tone/intonation/etc.). Some prosody-segment interactions are commonly found (e.g. tone lowering with depressor consonants) and others are known to be quite rare (e.g. tone height dependent on vowel height), but in general its empirical landscape has not been firmly established. This talk argues that we must add to this typology a novel process we call ‘tone-driven epenthesis’, defined as the phonological insertion of a vowel in order to host a tone (e.g. a high pitch target). We show evidence for tone-driven epenthesis in two African languages Wamey (Tenda, Niger-Congo: Senegal)...
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Talk by Kevin Tang (HHU Düsseldorf)

We are happy to announce the next talk by Kevin Tang (HHU Düsseldorf) in the Phonology Colloquium. Title: Sentence prosody leaks into the lexicon: evidence from Mandarin Chinese Date: Wednesday, 15.06.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: IG 4.301 in person, if necessary with additional Zoom If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract: While the precise extent to which phrasal phonology interacts with word-level phonology is a long-standing issue, it is generally assumed that lexical phonology is at least somewhat independent of phrasal phonology, including intonation. Exemplar theory complicates this division, as phonetically detailed exemplars encode context-dependent prosody in the lexical representation (Pierrehumbert 2016). In line with this prediction, some evidence for the lexical encoding of intonation has been found in German and English, languages in which pitch accents are assigned at the phrasal level (Schweitzer et al. 2015). Schweitzer et al. showed that f0 contours are more stable in predictable collocations than in unpredictable collocations, suggesting a possible lexicalization of intonation. The current study probes this issue in Mandarin...
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