phonology

Unbounded recursion in two dimensions, where syntax and prosody meet

Both syntax and prosody seem to require structures with unbounded branching, something that is not immediately provided by multiple context free grammars or other equivalently expressive formalisms. That extension is easy, and does not disrupt an …

Jonathan Barnes and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (eds.) (2022). Prosodic theory and practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. ix + 453.

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Range in the use and realization of BIN in African American English

This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of BIN, a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as "stressed". It brings together data from the Corpus …

Representing multiple dependencies in prosodic structures

Association of tones to prosodic trees was introduced in Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988). This included: (i) tonal association to higher-level prosodic nodes such as intonational phrases, and (ii) multiple association of a tone to a higher-level …

Computational perspectives on phonological constituency and recursion

Whether or not phonology has recursion is often conflated with whether or not phonology has strings or trees as data structures. Taking a computational perspective from formal language theory and focusing on how phonological strings and trees are …

Biases from MAE-ToBI intonational transcription conventions in the intonational analysis of African American English

Intonational transcription conventions from MAE-ToBI (Mainstream American English-Tones and Break Indices) (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986, Beckman & Elam 1997, Veilleux et al. 2006) are commonly taken as a starting point for the intonational analysis …

Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan

Samoan is an ergative-marking, (reportedly) non-tonal Polynesian language in which ergative case is marked segmentally, but absolutive case has been said to be unmarked. This paper shows that in fact, a high edge tone co-occurs with absolutive …

Advantages of Constituency: Computational Perspectives on Samoan Word Prosody

In this paper, we computationally implement and compare grammars of Samoan stress patterns that refer to feet and that refer only to syllables in Karttunen’s finite state formalization of Optimality Theory, and in grammars that directly state …

The word-level prosody of Samoan

This paper documents and analyses stress and vowel length in Samoan words. The domain of footing, the Prosodic Word, appears to be a root and cohering suffixes; prefixes and most disyllabic suffixes form a separate domain. Vowel sequences that …

Intonational phonology in Bengali and English infant-directed speech

We examined the phonetics and phonology of intonation of infant-directed speech (IDS) and non-IDS in story-reading in two typologically-divergent languages, English and Bengali. In addition to finding an increase in f0 range and variability in IDS, …