Draga Zec gave an Invited Talk (with Dr. Elizabeth Zsiga, Georgetown University) on "Tone and stress as agents of cross-dialectal variation: the case of Serbian" at the International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology, NINJAL, Tokyo, held virtually on Dec 13-15, 2019

Draga Zec gave an Invited Talk titled "Pitch Accent in Serbo-Croatian" at the Pre-ICPP Workshop, NINJAL, Tokyo, Japan on Dec 12, 2019 

Draga Zec gave an Invited Talk (with Dr. Elizabeth Zsiga, Georgetown University) titled "Pitch accents in a dialectal continuum: The role of tone and stress" at the The Arctic University of Norway, Tromso, Norway on November 15, 2019

Rachel Vogel and Dr. Sarah Murray presented a paper titled:  "Prosodically Conditioned Phonology in Cheyenne" at the 51st Algonquian Conference, held October 24-27, 2019 at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec

Paper Abstract:  

This research investigates prosodic structure in Cheyenne, an Algonquian language of Oklahoma and Montana[1]. Specifically, we examine two phonological phenomena, phrase- final devoicing and downstep (tone lowering over a phrase), in a 1965 text by a male Cheyenne speaker[2].

Foundational work on Cheyenne described both processes as occurring within a phonological phrase, and the former before a pause[3], but does not otherwise define phonological phrases or other prosodic domains in Cheyenne. Our research therefore addresses the questions a) whether the same prosodic domain does indeed condition both processes, and b) if so, what that domain is. More broadly, our work explores how archival materials can be used for phonetic and phonological analysis, and how prosodic organization manifests in naturalistic data.

Transcription and inspection of pitch and voicing in Praat were used to identify instances of downstep and phrase-final devoicing in the narrative. Results show that both processes do co-occur (overlapping 75% of the time). Additionally, we find that these processes do not simply occur at the end of every word, nor only sentence-finally. Furthermore, we observe that they most often coincide with pauses (75% of the time), which are generally associated with large phrasal prosodic breaks.

We conclude that phrase-final devoicing and downstep are in fact conditioned by the same domain (see Leman’s description[2]), and that there is therefore at least one prosodic level between the word and the utterance in Cheyenne. Our work also demonstrates that we can find evidence for prosodic organization in naturalistic, archival data.

References:

[1] Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). (2019). Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-second edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

[2] Leman, W. (1979). A Reference Grammar of the Cheyenne Language. Lulu Press.

[3] Leman, W. (1981). Cheyenne pitch rules. International Journal of American Linguistics, 47(4), 283-309.