Phontastic 12 March 2019: Introduction to Prosody

We'd like to invite you to the next Phontastic meeting this year. This time, the focus is on Prosody.

Prosodic Phonology (e.g. Nespor and Vogel 1986) postulates the existence of a universal Prosodic Hierarchy that imposes structural domains on all languages, such as syllable, foot, prosodic word, intonational phrase, and utterance. The main aim of this meeting is two-fold. First, we're going to address some general issues associated with the Prosodic Hierarchy, such as defining the structural domains as well as the theories describing both the nature of the relationship between prosody and segmental phonetics and the direction of prosodically-induced variation in segments.

After that we're going to investigate the universality of the Prosodic Hierarchy. To do that, we'll discuss a number of phonetic studies conducted on various languages, including (but not limited to) French, English, Korean, Thai, and Dutch. We're also going to take a look at the preliminary findings of an ongoing Preludium project that is taking place at our Faculty and which focuses on Polish. An alternative theory of the relationship between prosody and segmental phonetics will be presented (Schwartz 2016).

The meeting is open to all BA and MA students.

When? Tuesday, 12.03.2019, 18:30
Where? Collegium Martineum, room A.

Selected references:

• Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. and A. E. Turk. 1996. “A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing”, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 193–247.
• Schwartz, G. 2016. On the evolution of prosodic boundaries – parameter settings for Polish and English. Lingua 171, 37-73.
• Wojtkowiak, E. and G. Schwartz. 2019. "VOT and the shape of the Prosodic Hierarchy in Polish". Poster presented at the 16th Old World Conference on Phonology, University of Verona.