Dr. Abby Cohen and Rachel Vogel presented a paper titled "Variation in two patterns of word-initial deletion in Jakarta Indonesia: Insight from naturalistic data" at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), held August 5-9, 2019.

Paper Abstract: 

Based on naturalistic corpus data, we investigate two patterns of phonetic variation observed in Jakarta Indonesian (JI), an emerging variety of colloquial Indonesian spoken in and around Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. Word-initial [s] ~ Ø is observed in grammatical forms and taken to be lexicalized, e.g. saja ~ aja ‘just’, sampe ~ ampe ‘until’. Word-initial [h] ~ Ø is more pervasive and said to be an optional phonological rule of H deletion, e.g. hari ~ ari ‘day’, habis ~ abis ‘finished’.

We examine the patterns of variation in these two variables for 20 speakers, in terms of lexical properties, frequency, phonological conditioning and socio-indexical factors—sex, education, and age—in order to contribute to a fuller understanding of patterns of inter- and intra- speaker variation in this rapidly developing language variety.

Draga Zec and Dr. Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University) presented a paper titled "Serbian Pitch Accent from a Cross-Dialectal Perspective: Evidence for a Domain Generalization Effect” at the 27th Manchester Phonology Meeting, Manchester, England, held May 23-25, 2019

Draga Zec and Dr. Martin Krämer (The Arctic University of Norway) presented a paper titled “The variable vocalic nature of syllabic consonants” at the 27th Manchester Phonology Meeting, held in Manchester, England from May 23-25, 2019.

Draga Zec gave an Invited Talk on "On the Morphology of Weight in South Slavic" at the Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 28 Conference, held at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY from May 3-5, 2019