33.501, Summer Schools: Speech Matters / Italy

Wed Feb 9 23:38:02 UTC 2022

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-501. Wed Feb 09 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.501, Summer Schools:  Speech Matters / Italy

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Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2022 18:36:16
From: Andrea Sansò [andrea.sanso at uninsubria.it]
Subject: Speech Matters / Italy

 Speech matters

Host Institution: 
Website: http://spma.lakecomoschool.org

Dates: 16-May-2022 - 20-May-2022
Location: Como, Lombardia, Italy

Focus: speech, linguistic theory, prosody, typology
Minimum Education Level: MA

Special Qualifications:
The school will be of interest to PhD candidates and Postdocs working on various fields having to do with spoken language

Description:
The systematic study of spoken language has not, until recently, been associated with models that focus on describing ‘grammar’, which are generally based on the written language. The bulk of such models has not been particularly concerned with analyzing spoken data beyond noting, occasionally, that a specific pattern may have different instantiations in spoken language from what it has in ‘standard’ grammar.

This bias away from spoken language, however, reflects more the traditional understanding of what a grammarian ought to study than any intrinsic limitation of grammatical models with respect to their applicability to the study of spoken data and to larger stretches of discourse as the domain of analysis. As a result, the insights stemming from research on spoken language data in fields such as sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and discourse analysis are not generally subsumed by models of human communication, although they have the potential to change our view of grammar, with crucial consequences also for speech technologies. The success of the latter, indeed, crucially depends on the creation of realistic training data appropriate to the task that is to be carried out, and on their appropriate modelling.

When we speak, indeed, not every linguistic choice is equally probable. As speakers, we tend to use structures and patterns that better fit the needs of the spoken modality because of their efficiency or social adequacy. This determines the cross-linguistic ubiquity of features that can be considered as modality-specific constraints, i.e. features occurring in spoken texts of different languages. These modality-specific constants do not only depend on the use of the vocal-auditory channel, but also on the complex semiotic and communicative conditions in which spoken texts are typically produced, and consist in discourse or linguistic features with a high yield factor, i.e. elements optimized to facilitate the production and the reception of speech.

The aim of this School is to bring together scholars working on spoken language data from different angles, with a view to building bridges among different fields such as linguistic typology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, prosodic analysis, and speech technologies. The novelty of the school lies precisely in this effort to paving the way for a more fruitful interaction among disciplinary fields that share the object of analysis (spoken language) but approach it with different methodologies and with different goals in mind, and that do not often cross-fertilize each other.

The school will comprise five courses and three labs:

Course 1: “From speech to grammar” (Prof. Miriam Voghera, Università di Salerno)

Course 2: “Crosslinguistic study of reference production and argument structure in spoken-language discourse” (Prof. Stefan Schnell, Universität Zürich)

Course 3: “Speech as a symbolic resource in different types of speaker communities” (Prof. Miriam Meyerhoff, All Souls College, University of Oxford)

Course 4: “Prosody, gesture, and conversation: multiple communicative systems and the organization of interaction” (Prof. Margaret Zellers, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel)

Course 5: “Methods of speech synthesis with an emphasis on articulatory synthesis” (Prof. Peter Birkholz, Technische Universität Dresden)

Lab 1: The use of softwares in language documentation: transcribing and annotating spoken corpora (Prof. Eugenio Goria, Università di Torino);

Lab 2: Doing prosodic analysis – An introduction (Dr. Riccardo Orrico, Università di Napoli);

Lab 3: Identifying and describing procedural items in discourse: the case of discourse markers (Prof. Ilaria Fiorentini, Università di Pavia; Prof. Andrea Sansò, Università dell’Insubria).

This event is supported by the Department of Human Sciences (Disuit) of the University of Insubria.

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                      Discourse Analysis
                      General Linguistics
                      Language Documentation
                      Linguistic Theories
                      Phonetics
                      Phonology
                      Pragmatics
                      Sociolinguistics
                      Typology

Tuition: 150 EURO

Tuition Explanation: Each course will comprise from 3 to 4 lectures. Tuition fees include all courses as well as coffee and lunch breaks.

Registration: 21-Mar-2022 to 04-Apr-2022

Contact Person: Andrea Sansò
                Email: andrea.sanso at uninsubria.it

Registration Instructions:

Deadlines:
Application submission: March 11th, 2022
Notification of acceptance: March 21st, 2022
Registration and payment: April 4th, 2022

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