Talk by Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken) in the Phonology Colloqium

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Bernd Möbius in the Phonology Colloqium on Wednesday, 13.12.2023, 16-18 ct. in IG 4.301. Title: Information Density and Phonetic Variation. Abstract: In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit's negative log probability in a given context). The main hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between information density and phonetic encoding. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant trajectories, stop consonant voicing, syllable duration, and vowel space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries, in the statistical...
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Talk by Kathleen Jepson (LMU München): Encoding focus within noun phrases in a free word order language

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Kathleen Jepson (LMU München) on Wednesday, 29.11.2023, from 16-18 in IG 4.301. Abstract: Prosody often encodes focus and givenness at the utterance level. Within noun phrases (NPs), languages use phonological prosodic means such as accenting focused and new information, and deaccenting given information, as well as phonetic prosodic cues such as relative pitch height and alignment, and variation in intensity. Some languages, however, do not mark focus within NPs prosodically, or may have a number of other mechanisms to do the task such as syntactic movement or morphological markers. This talk is concerned with how focus and givenness are realised within NPs in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language. Like many Australian languages, Djambarrpuyŋu allows free word order at the utterance-level and within NPs, and additionally permits discontinuous nominal constituents in which the noun and modifiers occur distributed throughout the clause. In other Australian languages, the variability...
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Talk by Lena Borise (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest)

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Lena Borise (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest)! Title: A unified prosodic account of two types of preverbal foci Date: Wednesday, 08.02.2023 Time: 16-18 ct. 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: The preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, common especially in verb-final languages, has been shown to result from different syntactic configurations cross-linguistically. Some immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement (e.g., in Hungarian; Bródy 1990; É. Kiss 1998), while other ones remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement (e.g., in Turkish; Şener 2010). We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in-situ ones, based...
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Talk by Alice Turk (University of Edinburgh)

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
Title: The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and Prosodic Structure. Date: Wednesday, 14.12.2022 Time: 16-18 ct. 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: The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and Prosodic Structure In this talk, I review the claims of the Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis in speech production.  The Smooth Signal Redundancy view hypothesizes that speakers plan the complementarity of language redundancy (recognition likelihood based on lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic factors as well as real world knowledge) and acoustic redundancy (recognition likelihood based on acoustic salience) in order to achieve a smooth signal redundancy profile (even recognition likelihood of all elements in an utterance).  I discuss evidence that speakers control signal redundancy through the manipulation of planned prosodic structure, which includes both prominence and constituent structure. This evidence suggests that the Smooth...
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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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