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 Chinese, a
language with lexical tone and a well-studied system of prosodic focus marking. We ask
whether sentence level prosody (focus) can be similarly lexicalized in a language that
already has lexical tone.