2nd CfP: Prosodic Typology, February 24-26, 2010, Berlin

[René Schiering]

Prosodic Typology: State of the Art and Future Prospects

The study of prosody is traditionally concerned with suprasegmental features
such as stress, tone, intonation and quantity. More recently, its scope has
been expanded to include any phonological phenomenon sensitive to the
domains of the prosodic hierarchy (ranging from the syllable to the
utterance). In the course of this development, a number of theoretical
frameworks have been developed which make strong claims about possible
prosodic systems and their architecture. While the predictions are clear,
the cross-linguistic evidence is often less so, especially since too often
generalizations are based on a narrow language sample from better-known
European languages.

 

Call for Papers

We invite phonologists, typologists, and experts on individual languages to
submit abstracts addressing, among others, the following key questions in
prosodic typology:

1)      Which phenomena should be subsumed under the term ‘prosodic’? E.g.
is it reasonable to treat stress domains on a par with segmental
assimilation processes? (cf. Bickel et al. 2009)

2)      Can existing descriptive frameworks capture the attested diversity
in prosodic systems? E.g. does ToBI provide an adequate means for
cross-linguistic comparison? (cf. Jun 2005)

3)      Are phonological theories capable of handling typological variation?
E.g. can derivational approaches which assign metrical grids before
intonational pitch-accents account for cases like Kuot? (cf. Lindström &
Remijsen 2005)

 

Abstracts should be anonymous and should not exceed 1 page in length (an
additional page for data and/or references can be added). Please send your
abstracts electronically in pdf- and doc- or rtf-format to
rene at punksinscience.org. Include your name, affiliation and the title of the
abstract in the body of the e-mail.

 

Submission deadline: August 31st, 2009.

 

The workshop is organized by Gabriele Müller and René Schiering
(Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster). It takes place as part of the
annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (German
Linguistic Society, DGfS) in Berlin between February 24th and 26th, 2010:
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/dgfs/. We encourage participants to present in
English. Presentations at multiple workshops during DGfS are generally not
approved of.

 

Keynote speakers:

Daniel L. Everett, Illinois State University (tbc)

Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne (tbc)

 

References

Bickel, Balthasar, Kristine A. Hildebrandt & René Schiering (2009). The
distribution of phonological word domains: A probabilistic typology. In
Phonological Domains. Universals and Deviations, Janet Grijzenhout & Baris
Kabak (eds.), 47-74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.) (2005). Prosodic Typology. The Phonology of Intonation and
Phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lindström, Eva and Bert Remijsen (2005). Aspects of the prosody of Kuot, a
language where intonation ignores stress. Linguistics 43: 839-870.

 

Workshop site:
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Sprachwiss/Forschen/Projekte/prosodictypology.htm
l.

 

****************

Dr. phil. René Schiering, M.A.

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Institut für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

Aegidiistr. 5

48143 Münster

Tel.: (49) 251 83 244 90

Fax: (49) 251 83 298 78

E-mail:  <mailto:rene at punksinscience.org> rene at punksinscience.org

Internet:  <http://www.rene.punksinscience.org> www.rene.punksinscience.org

 

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