Draga Zec gave an Invited Talk (with Dr. Elizabeth Zsiga, Georgetown University) titled "Pitch accents in a dialectal continuum: The role of tone and stress" at the The Arctic University of Norway, Tromso, Norway on November 15, 2019

Rachel Vogel and Dr. Sarah Murray presented a paper titled:  "Prosodically Conditioned Phonology in Cheyenne" at the 51st Algonquian Conference, held October 24-27, 2019 at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec

Paper Abstract:  

This research investigates prosodic structure in Cheyenne, an Algonquian language of Oklahoma and Montana[1]. Specifically, we examine two phonological phenomena, phrase- final devoicing and downstep (tone lowering over a phrase), in a 1965 text by a male Cheyenne speaker[2].

Foundational work on Cheyenne described both processes as occurring within a phonological phrase, and the former before a pause[3], but does not otherwise define phonological phrases or other prosodic domains in Cheyenne. Our research therefore addresses the questions a) whether the same prosodic domain does indeed condition both processes, and b) if so, what that domain is. More broadly, our work explores how archival materials can be used for phonetic and phonological analysis, and how prosodic organization manifests in naturalistic data.

Transcription and inspection of pitch and voicing in Praat were used to identify instances of downstep and phrase-final devoicing in the narrative. Results show that both processes do co-occur (overlapping 75% of the time). Additionally, we find that these processes do not simply occur at the end of every word, nor only sentence-finally. Furthermore, we observe that they most often coincide with pauses (75% of the time), which are generally associated with large phrasal prosodic breaks.

We conclude that phrase-final devoicing and downstep are in fact conditioned by the same domain (see Leman’s description[2]), and that there is therefore at least one prosodic level between the word and the utterance in Cheyenne. Our work also demonstrates that we can find evidence for prosodic organization in naturalistic, archival data.

References:

[1] Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). (2019). Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-second edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

[2] Leman, W. (1979). A Reference Grammar of the Cheyenne Language. Lulu Press.

[3] Leman, W. (1981). Cheyenne pitch rules. International Journal of American Linguistics, 47(4), 283-309.

Seun-Eun Kim presented a paper titled "The prosody of contrastive topic in Korean" at the 27th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, held Oct 18-20 2019 in Seoul, Korea

Paper Abstract:

This study investigates the prosody of Contrastive Topic (CT) in Korean, with reference to findings on CT prosody in Japanese. CT is defined as a phrase denoting what the question being addressed is about but at the same time implies other questions about different topics (Constant 2014). According to Lee (2006), CT is marked morphologically and prosodically in Korean: CT is followed by the particle -NUN, which also marks non-contrastive Topic in Korean, and is realized with a high accent ((L)H* or L+H*L-H%). CT has been discussed in relation to non-contrastive Topic (T) and Focus (F); Lee (2006) argues that Korean CT has a prosodic pattern distinct from T and F.

The present study conducted an experiment to examine these observations about CT in Korean. It specifically investigated the prosody of CT not only on the target word, but in the global pitch contour. The results showed that on the target word, CT is prosodically distinct from both F and T, but showed a bigger difference with F than T. The global pitch contour of CT and F were similar in that both showed peak compression on the following prosodic word (pwd), consistent with Tomioka’s (2010) finding that both CT and F exhibit post-peak compression in Japanese.

Draga Zec and Dr. Martin Kramer (The Arctic University of Norway)  presented a paper titled "The gradient categorical vocalic behavior of syllabic consonants" at the  7th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2019) at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, held October 11-13, 2019