Next year’s glow in vienna will include a workshop on the phonological marking of focus and topic, organized by Edwin Williams. Note that this workshop has a separate submission site on easy chair.
Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2010
Meeting Description:
GLOW 34 will be hosted by the department of linguistics, University of
Vienna
Colloquium: April 28-30, 2011,
Workshops: April 27 2011, May 1, 2011
Colloquium Topic: How much syntax is there in grammar?
Subject areas: Phonology, Semantics, Morphology, Syntax, Pragmatics,
Psycholinguistics
In addition there will be three workshops:
Intervention Effects from a Semantic Perspective
April 27, 2011
Workshop on the Phonological Marking of Focus and Topic
April 27, 2011
Here’s the description of the workshop on focus and topic:
The workshop will take the semantic notions of topic and focus as given, and investigate the systems for phonologically marking them, especially concentrating on variation in how the marking is done across languages. For example, we have the shiftable pitch-accents of Germanic languages vs. the relatively fixed prosodic structures of Romance; on a broader scale, we have languages like Japanese that do not use pitch-accents to mark focus, but nevertheless mark focus phonologically, through phrasing and varying pitch range. The following empirical and analytic questions are put forward as central to the project of the workshop:
* Are there languages in which there is no prosodic reflex of contrastive focus or givenness?
* How do those languages which encode focus and givenness prosodically differ in the phonological and phonetic tools to mark these notions?
* Do phrasing and prominence go hand-in-hand, or are they two orthogonal dimensions that interact with focus and givenness marking independently?
* Which comes first, focus or prominence; that is, is the mapping accent-to-focus or focus-to-accent?
* Are differences in focus marking paralleled by differences in topic marking?
* How does the marking of contrastive or’‘corrective’’ focus/topic differ from neutral focus/topic across languages?
* How do phonological means of marking topic or focus interact with syntactic and morphological means?
Comparative studies are especially encouraged, as well as studies of systems different from the well-known ones.
The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in digital multimedia, networking and mass storage are promising a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published corpora of natural speech that are thousands of times larger.
To welcome and promote this revolution, we will organize a workshop on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies; variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop.
Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics.
Important Dates
We are pleased to announce that the the ninth International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP’11) will be held in Montreal, Canada from June 20th to 23rd, 2011. ISSP’11 is the continuation of a series of seminars dating back to Grenoble (1988), Leeds (1990), Old Saybrook (1993), Autrans (1996), Kloster Seeon (2000), Sydney (2003), Ubatuba (2006), and Strasbourg (2008). Several aspects of speech production will be covered, such as phonology, phonetics, linguistics, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neurosciences and computer science.
For this edition, a special session will be organized in honor of Dr. Joseph Perkell, for his contribution to the field.
THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS NOVEMBER 15th, 2010. Technical details will be posted soon on the conference website (www.issp2011.uqam.ca).
Here’s an article by Guy Deutscher on language and how it influences thinking. Mercifully, Deutscher discusses this fascinating topic without trying to further inflate its public appeal by vague claims on how it all devalidates generative linguistics and most of all Chomsky (it sure sounds cool to argue against a big name, and why not an entire field?)–as Lera Boroditsky unfortunately did here. As if this research was only interesting if it also showed that someone else’s research is worthless. Daniel Harbour has some insightful comments on the latter article on his blog, and points out that it’s unclear just how this is supposed to invalidate the kinds of assumptions many generative linguists make these days. If you are (as most linguists) mostly interested in the nuts-and-bolts of how language works in all its beautiful intricacy it can be exasperating to watch how far the level of argumentation often drops when people start debating universal grammar (in my experience that tendency exists on both sides of the debate). A lot of linguistic research is interesting independent of whether one believes in universal grammar, and it seems to me that a lot of the work and the results don’t bear on this question at all, and don’t even rely on the assumptions that Daniel lists.
Besides, it’s much more fun (at least if you’re a linguist) to read about the exciting research on how cross-linguistic differences influence how we think that is conducted in Boroditsky’s lab and elsewhere without the unnecessary swipes. Another Daniel, Daniel Casasanto, a recent graduate from Boroditsky’s lab, wrote an interesting article a while ago on linguistic relativity and the debates it has generated, which does a nice job at clarifying what this renaissance in linguistic relativity research is about and what it is not about, aptly titled Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Whorf?
In case anyone is still worried that texting abbreviations are a sign that the English language is deteriorating they should have a look at the article in the Guardian a few days ago about an upcoming exhibition on language at the British Library in London, which provides evidence that these abbreviations are actually a time-honored tradition of playful language/orthography use. Among other things the exhibition revisits the history of language peevery, it seems, with such landmarks as Jonathan Swift’s A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. One of the many grievances Jonathan Swift had with his fellow English users was that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words. Swift would surely not have been amused by the poetic use of things like “I wrote 2U B4” in an 19th century poem the exhibition features. Anatol Stefanowitsch, whose blog post pointed me to this, dug up the complete poem referred to in the article, Essay to Miss Catharine Jay, as it was published in 1847. Some of the ‘emblems’ are not easy to resolve, have a look… The one that Anatol is wondering about in his post is ‘The girl without a parallel’ as a girl without a parallel pointed out to me.
Radiolab’s interesting current podcast is about language. Radiolab is a great radio show about science, and it differs from your typical media outlet on science in that its topics are often drawn from cognitive science. I can think of a bunch of questions relating to the strong claims made in the show about how relevant language is to perform various cognitive tasks, but the research the show reports on is fascinating. See also the additional video that comes with the podcast, also featured on the language log, including some nice footage of Taughannock Falls:
Something everyone seems to have intuitions about is: What types of rhyme sound good? What types of rhyme sound bad? One particular type of rhyme, called ‘identity rhyme’ (write/right, to bear, a bear), is licit in French but quite poor in English (So poor indeed that King James proscribed the use of identity rhymes in a treatise in 1584.) See an earlier post on the topic here.
We present evidence that this difference in rhyming between French (and other Romance languages) and English (and other Germanic languages) can be explained by a seemingly unrelated difference between them: English uses emphasis to foreground new and contrastive information and to background old and repeated information, much like one uses a highlighter to emphasize important information in a text. French (and other Romance languages) does not use acoustic prominence in this way, or at least does so to a much smaller degree and under a much narrower set of circumstances. An admittedly quirky but illustrative example: the name of the band AC/DC has less prominence on the two ‘C’s in English and other Germanic language, but not in French and other Romance languages. This difference becomes very salient in french-accented English and English-accented French, a fact one can experience every day in a bilingual city like Montreal. We argue that the mechanics of how this ‘highlighter’ works in English has the effect that identity rhymes sound odd.
[completely unrelated side note: i was wondering what the right agreement is in the sentence above, and ‘the mechanics of … has’ and ‘the mechanics of … have’ and i let the google vote. both seem to be equally used (same for is/are)]
Title and Abstract of the Paper:
Michael Wagner (McGill University) & Kate McCurdy (Harvard University)
Poetic Rhyme Reflects Cross-Linguistic Differences in Information Structure
Identity rhymes (to bear/a bear, right/write) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers’ intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.
Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk will be visiting at McGill. The schedule of the presentations is posted here. This visit is part of the mcsirg interface group at McGill. They will also present as invited speakers at the Mosaic workshop on June 1st.
This looks like it’s going to be an interesting event, conveniently scheduled right before AMLaP at York University:
The School of Psychology at The University of Dundee and the Department of Psychology at The University of Edinburgh are pleased to announce the 6th International Workshop on Language Production. The workshop is dedicated to fostering an interdisciplinary approach to language production research by including work in areas such as psycholinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology, linguistics, computational modelling, and neuroimaging. It will be organized around tutorial-like talks intended to provide a review of research questions and stimulate discussion. The workshop program also includes poster sessions to offer graduate students and others the opportunity to showcase their most recent findings.
