Talks

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)...

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...