Upcoming events
Event Information:
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Thu13Jun20242:00 pmLokaal 3.30 - Camelot, Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren
Giuseppe Magistro (UGent) - "Creating a corpus of web-data with Pyrlato. A demonstration"
Show contentThe use of corpora in acoustic analyses has become a standard practice in phonetic phonological research, offering high ecological validity (see e.g. Beckman, 1997; Warner, 2012; Tucker & Mukai, 2023 for a discussion on validity). However, compiling corpora and looking for specific phenomena can be time and resource-consuming. In response to this challenge, we developed a program named Pyrlato, which we aim to demonstrate. Pyrlato is a novel tool designed for creating corpora of real-world spoken data from the web. The tool extracts audio files from YouTube, cutting and extracting desired segments such as specific phonemes, syllables, or words found in YouTube videos. This enables the creation of corpora with tens of thousands of tokens within a few computational hours. Pyrlato works across Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese, i.e. those languages for which YouTube provides automatic subtitles. The software searches for the desired string in the subtitles and, upon finding the match, extracts the relevant audio extract containing the string in .mp3 format (other formats are also possible).
The demonstration will showcase Pyrlato's online version and the application of some case studies.
• Beckman, M.E. (1997).A typology of spontaneous speech. In Y. Sagisaka, N. Campbell, & N. Higuchi (Eds.), Computing Prosody: Computational Models for Processing Spontaneous Speech (pp. 7–26). Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_2.
• Tucker, B.V., & Mukai, Y. (2023). Spontaneous speech. Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943024.
• Warner, N. (2012). Methods for studying spontaneous speech. In A. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. Huffman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (pp. 621–633). Oxford University Press.
Past events
Event Information:
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Thu18May20173:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal 3de verdieping
If not ≠ unless - Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic
Show contentElisabeth Witzenhausen: If not ≠ unless - Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic
In this talk, I address the difference between negative conditionals (1a) and exceptive clauses (1b).
(1) I will come and help you ...
a) if I don‘t fall into a river
b) unless I fall into a river
It has long been claimed that exceptives and negative conditionals share the same underlying semantic structure, with differences only in the surface structure; however, Geis (1973) and those following him have presented challenges for this view, suggesting rather that the two constructions have different semantics. I present data from Middle Dutch (MD), Middle High German (MHG) and Middle Low German (MLG) that support an analysis of two different semantic structures. In doing so, I discuss some observations regarding conditionals more generally in the modern Germanic languages that are relevant to understanding the historical data from my corpus study. In particular, in MD, MHG and MD, exceptive adverbial clauses appear as subjunctive V2-clauses without any complementizer (2). In the early stages, the preverbal clitic ne is used which expressed sentential negation in Old Saxon (OS) and Old High German (OHG).
(2) dhe scal ome sin wulle loen gheuen he ne hebbe it uerboret mit bosheit
DEM shall him his demanded wage give he NE have.SUBJ it forfeited with mischief
‘who shall give him his demanded wage, unless he has forfeited it with mischief.’
(Westphalian: 1492)
I will provide arguments for analysing MD, MLG and MHG exceptives as peripheral adverbial clauses, while their related OHG and OS structures are central adverbial clauses.