Events

Lorenzo Maselli (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): "The importance of integrated articulatory and acoustic analysis for consonant identification: Some preliminary data from Ethiosemitic and Jukunoid".

Abstract:
While it is generally believed that the first step towards the phonological description of a language is the study of minimal pairs and allophonic variation, it is also true that the exact identification of what sounds we deal with in natural languages requires some level of acoustic analysis. There is a variety of spectral phenomena which serve as reliable cues to the phonetic properties of sounds, but a lot of important distinctions are left untouched. A fairly well-known example is that of voicing in English: while VOT is a generally reliable cue for stops, low frequency energy (the so-called “voicing bar”) is a less clear marker for fricatives, although the opposition is arguably just as salient throughout the phonology (Abramson & Whalen 2017). I will take into account some less common from African languages as cases in point. Amharic ejectives are traditionally considered “weak” (i.e. less acoustically salient than, for example, Tigrinya ones; cf. Kingston 1985), but preliminary data from L2 acquisition points in the direction of some categorical restructuring in the absence of clearer articulatory evidence. Likewise, while there is a long-standing notion that functional load plays little phonological role (King 1967), it was recently claimed that “peripheral phonemes” seem to behave in a fairly different way than more common ones (Babel 2017). Even salient oppositions may require different phonological treatment on the basis of, e.g., morphological variation, as is the case for Italian /m/ vs /n/. The exact determination of what sounds take part in an alternation could benefit from more detailed production analysis. An example will be drawn from Win Lau, a poorly described Jukunoid language of Nigeria, where [+back] spread can yield an as yet phonetically undescribed uvular or epiglottal consonant before back vowels. From this angle, closer interaction between articulatory, perceptual and acoustic evidence seems to be desirable, even for field research.

References
Abramson, A. S., Whalen, D. H. (2017) “Voice Onset Time (VOT) at 50: Theoretical and Practical Issues in Measuring Voicing Distinctions”, Journal of Phonetics 63, 75–86
Babel, A. M. (2017) “Aspirates and ejectives in Quechua-influenced Spanish”, Spanish in Context 14, n. 2, 159-185
King, R. D. (1967) “Functional load and sound change”, Language 43, n. 4, 831-842
Kingston, J. (1985) “The Phonetics and Phonology of the Timing of Oral and Glottal Events”, PhD dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley

Hilde Gunnink (UGent): "Contact between Bantu and Khoisan languages in southern Africa: morphological borrowing in Yeyi".

Abstract: In southern Africa, there has been long-standing language contact between between Khoisan languages, some of which have been spoken since time immemorial, and Bantu languages, who arrived in the region in the last two millenia. The Bantu language that has been influenced most extensively by Khoisan contact is Yeyi, spoken in northwestern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. This Bantu language has acquired a large number of clicks, crosslinguistically highly uncommon phonemes that only occur natively in Khoisan languages and are therefore a clear indicator of language contact. In this paper, I investigate the extent of Khoisan influence in the morphology of Yeyi, showing that Yeyi has acquired certain bound affixes from neighbouring Khoisan languages. Such morphological borrowing is relatively uncommon in languages, and suggests that contact between Yeyi and Khoisan must have been fairly intensive, and, unlike many other Bantu-Khoisan contact situation in the subcontinent, may have involved a certain degree of proficiency in Khoisan languages on the part of the Yeyi speech community. As such the contact-induced changes attested in Yeyi can be used to shed light on the contact situation in which they arose, and provide a clearer picture of Bantu-Khoisan interactions.

Abstract

In my talk, I will discuss my planned research on the Development of Dutch Orthography and I hope to exchange ideas on Data Enrichment for the first stage of the project. This first stage will take place within a research visit at Gent University.

The main scope of the project proposed here is the description of unguided (not-steered) development of writing systems for West Germanic dialects based on the Latin alphabet. It will render this from diatopic and diachronic grapheme research on Middle Dutch local charters.

Dutch diachronic orthography research has been the focus of research in the last decennium, however mostly focusing on Early Modern Dutch and later stages, and usually in the context of standardisation. That means it is limited to how orthographic development of a language operates within the parameters of a society that is aware of and pays lip service to a supra-regional, consciously and unconsciously superimposed or pursued variety. In my proposed research, I will focus on the period before Early Modern Dutch and the standardisation processes, and ask the question: “How do scribes cope in writing with the Latin alphabet in their dialects when there is no prescribed standard?”To answer this, the writings of scribes who operate in local writing systems, i.e. written dialect, need to be considered, and this should be done with manuscripts, e.g. handwritten administrative texts of local importance only, such as local charters.

Preliminary research suggests that in case of vowel grapheme systems, the aptness of singular graphemes is gradable and can be described in terms of the phonological distinctive features they may convey accurately (De Wulf 2019, in preparation). This stems from the fact that some graphemes are used to convey many more historical phonemes (i.e. West Germanic allophones) than others, and which graphemes these are, also varies from dialect to dialect. There is a clear indication that vowel grapheme systems in the Eastern dialects contain less accurate graphemes, since more of the historical vowel phonemes have in fact evolved into separate phonemes. My working hypothesis is that an implicational scale of phonological features can be established (per dialect or maybe more generally, dialect region), which means that certain features are to be prioritised in writing systems. This should be investigated for vowel as well as consonant graphemes.

The here proposed project will have to clarify whether this holds through for all types of graphemes, and whether this variety is maintained throughout medieval writing in the period 1250-1400.

As the main deliverable I will provide an open access and electronically published diachronic grapheme atlas with commentary.