Masayuki Gibson

Currently, my main interests lie in the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation. As a starting point, I am examining how "rising" intonation (often, but not always, a prosodic cue for certain question types) interacts with various lexical tones in both Chinese-type tone languages and tone languages such as Japanese that are usually categorized as "pitch accent" languages.

I am also interested in opacity. While it is generally acknowledged that opacity is the single biggest problem for traditional Optimality Theory, it often goes unacknowledged that not all opacity is the same. For example, if we look at cases of opacity from different languages in the domain of allomorph selection, we see that there is a difference in which OT models (paradigm optimization, cyclic OT, Stratal OT, e.g.) can account for them. This reflects fundamental differences in the sources of opacity.

Another topic of interest for me is the phonetic and phonological nature of preaspiration. In 2006 I did a phonetic study of Icelandic in which I examined the spectral details of tokens containing preaspiration and compared them to similar, non-aspirated tokens as well as whispered tokens in order to see if preaspiration should be treated as the analogue to postaspiration (i.e. a feature on the following consonant), as a part of the vowel (or nucleus), or as an independent segment. While the study was merely a pilot, the preliminary results indicate that the interaction between preaspiration and other speech elements is more complicated than previously assumed.

PAPERS/TALKS/POSTERS

2008. "Rising" Intonation on "Falling" Tones. Poster presented at NELS 39, Cornell. (download PDF)

2008. (with Hertz, S., Glatthorn, N., Hegde, P., Mills, H., Spencer, I) The Role of Prosody in Speech Parsing. Poster presented at Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody, Cornell (go to NovaSpeech to download)

2008. Opaque Allomorph Selection: The Need for Intermediate Forms. Talk given at the 2008 Meeting of the LSA.

SERVICES

Co-Editor (with Jonathan Howell) for Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVI (2006)

Co-Editor (with Tova Friedman) for Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVII (2007)

Student Coordinator of the Cornell Linguistics Circle (CLC) Speaker Series (2005-2007)

TEACHING

Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Phonology (spring 2009; instructor: Abby Cohn)

Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Linguistics (fall 2008; instructor: Carol Rosen)

Course Assistant for Phonetics I (fall 2008; instructor: Sue Hertz)

Grader for "English Words: Histories and Mysteries" (fall 2007; instructor: Wayne Harbert)