Societas Linguistica Europaea 2010 Vilnius University 2-5 September
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Societas Linguistica Europaea 2010 Vilnius University 2-5 September 2010 Book of abstracts (A-K) Position-dependent alternation between monophthongs and diphthongs in the dialects of Southern Italy. Abete, Giovanni (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena / Università di Napoli “Federico II”) Some dialects of Southern Italy are characterized by a phenomenon of phonetic alternation between monophthongs and diphthongs. This alternation depends mainly on the position of the word in the prosodic structure (Rohlfs 1966: § 12). For example, in the dialect of Pozzuoli (close to Naples) the word for ‘fishes’ can be rendered as [p ɤɪʃʃ ] before some prosodic boundaries, while it will be rendered as [pi ʃʃ ] in internal position. Strictly related to this issue is the lengthening of vowels at different prosodic boundaries, a well documented process in a wide range of languages (e.g. Wightman et al. 1992). The interplay between prosodic position, vowel lengthening and monophthongal/diphthongal outcome will be analysed here by an acoustic and statistical approach. Four dialects of Southern Italy will be considered: Pozzuoli and Torre Annunziata in Campania, Belvedere Marittimo in Calabria, Trani in Apulia. The data were collected from casual conversations with fishermen of these communities (around 20 hours of recordings of 24 speakers). A pre-defined list of lexical items in the corpus was manually segmented and labelled. The labelling procedure focused on the position of each token in the prosodic structure, and especially on the presence/absence of Intonational Phrase ( IP ) boundaries and Intermediate Phrase ( ip ) boundaries (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986). Several acoustic analyses were performed on the labelled vocalic segments. The characterization of formant dynamics followed Simpson (1998): the segment was divided into notional 20 ms. portions and measurements of formants were taken for each portion. This procedure allows us to analyse the variations of formant trajectories according to different durational classes. On the basis of formant measures I calculated a coefficient of diphthongization, which represents an estimation of the euclidean distance covered by the diphthong in the F1-F2 space. This coefficient was crucial for an objective classification of each token in the continuum between diphthongal and monophthongal realizations. This paper presents the main results of the analysis of duration and formant structure. Moreover, a graphical representation of the diphthongs of each dialect in the acoustic/perceptual space is provided. The analysis of duration highlights a pattern of incremental lengthening before ip and IP boundaries, substantially in accordance with the results of other studies on varieties of Italian (e.g. Bertinetto et al. 2006). On the other hand, the dynamics of formants also co-varies systematically with prosodic position. In detail, the emergence of diphthongal realizations (defined by high scores of the coefficient) is generally limited to pre-IP boundary position, although there are interesting differences between the four dialects. The alternation between monophthongal and diphthongal realizations therefore seems to belong to the typology of other phenomena of phonetic variation which relate systematically to prosodic position, thus providing the speaker with acoustic cues for the segmentation of speech into phonological units (e.g. Fougeron & Keating 1997; Keating et al. 2003; Cho 2004; Cho et al. 2007). References Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986), Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook , 3, 255- 309. Bertinetto, P. M., Dell’Aglio, M. & Agonigi, M. (2006), Quali fattori influenzano maggiormente la durata vocalica e consonantica in italiano? Un’indagine mediante l’algoritmo di decisione C&RT. In La Comunicazione Parlata (M. Pettorino, A. Giannini, M. Vallone, R. Savy, eds.), Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Napoli 23-25 febbraio 2006. Napoli: Liguori, 13-38. Cho, T. (2004), Prosodically conditioned strengthening and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English. Journal of Phonetics , 32, 141-176. Cho, T., McQueen, J. M. & Cox, E. A. (2007), Prosodically driven phonetic detail in speech processing: the case of domain- initial strengthening in English. Journal of Phonetics , 35, 210-243. Fougeron, C. & Keating, P. A. (1997), Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domains. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 101 (6), 3728-3740. Keating, P., Cho, T., Fougeron, C. & Hsu, C. (2003), Domain-initial articulatory strengthening in four languages. In Phonetic interpretation (J. Local, R. Ogden, R. Temple, eds), Papers in Laboratory Phonology 6, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 143-161. Rohlfs, G. (1966) [1949], Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti. 1: Fonetica, Torino: Einaudi. Simpson, A. P. (1998), Characterizing the formant movements of German diphthongs in spontaneous speech. In Computer Linguistik und Phonetik zwischen Sprache und Sprechen (B. Schröder, W. Lenders, W. Hess & T. Portele, eds), Tagungsband der 4. Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache – KONVENS – 98. Frankfurt: Lang, 192-200. Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M. & Price, P. J. (1992), Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 91, 1707-1717. 2 SLE 2010. Vilnius University. 2 - 5 September 2010 Impersonal uses of French demonstrative ça. Achard, Michel (Rice University) In the French constructions described in (1) and (2), the impersonal pronoun il and the demonstrative ça ( ce, cela, c’ ) are virtually interchangeable: (1) « hé là! Sainte Vierge, est- il possible que le bon Dieu veuille faire souffrir ainsi une malheureuse créature humaine ? (Proust M. Du Cote de Chez Swann ) ‘Hey! Holy Virgin, is it possible that the Good Lord may want to inflict such suffering on a poor human creature?’ (2) est- ce possible que durant toute ma vie terrestre, je n'obtienne jamais un peu de justice ? (Bloy L. Journal T. 2 ) ‘Is this [it] possible that during all my life on earth I will never get a little justice?’ Despite this similarity, most syntactic accounts treat il constructions as impersonals and the structures which contain ça as dislocation constructions, and therefore analyze the two pronouns in radically different ways. For example, Jones (1996: 128) claims that: “impersonal sentences are constructions in which the subject position is occupied by a dummy pronoun il , which does not refer to anything”, while “ ce or ça are not impersonal constructions, but dislocated constructions” with the consequence that “the demonstratives are not ‘dummy’ pronouns, but referential expressions which refer forward to the finite or infinitival clause” (Jones 1996: 128). This presentation argues against this position, and claims that i) the constructions illustrated in (2) should be considered legitimate impersonals, and ii) the characteristics of ça impersonals which distinguish it from the il constructions are clearly observable in the pronoun’s other senses. With respect to i), a number of researchers (Cadiot 1988, Carlier 1996, Achard 2000) have shown that the pronoun’s reference is often quite flexible, to the point of sometimes being indistinguishable from a specific segment of reality, as illustrated in (3): (3) Elle vivait avec un jeune homme. Ça s'est mal passé entre eux. Il l'a tuée. She was living with a young man. It [this] went sour between them. He killed her. That segment of reality can be interpreted as the “field” within which the interaction profiled in the complement takes place (Langacker manuscript) in the context of the copular ( être ‘be’) construction, where the event/proposition in the complement is evaluated relative to the general categories of reality (epistemic modals), necessity (deontic modals), and emotion (emotion reaction), and hence accessible to any conceptualizer in a position to experience it. In this specific use, ça can be considered a true impersonal. With respect to ii), il and ça profile different reasons for evoking the scene coded in the complement: il constructions pertain to its existence, ça constructions to its evaluation. Importantly, although both il and ça can be said to profile the “field”, ça imposes a subjective construal on it. This subjective construal is inherited from ça ’s other uses, where the pronoun’s presence blurs the asymmetry between the subject and object of conceptualization by treating them both as an undistinguished part of the profiled scene. This is illustrated in (4), where the source and perceivers of the noise are both treated as part of the overall atmosphere. (4) Les Archaos ont investi le Cirque d'Hiver, et ça fait du vacarme. 'The Archaos have invaded the Cirque d'Hiver, and this makes a raucous. Inserting foreign roots. Verb formation in Georgian. Amiridze, Nino, Natia Putkaradze and Manana Topadze (Utrecht University). The talk deals with the use of foreign items inserted as roots in inflected Georgian verb forms (examples 1b, 1c, 2b and 3, to list just a few). Such verb forms are used in Georgian-English and Georgian-Russian code-switching in the speech of native users of Georgian. We are interested in formal means of nativizing foreign elements. The foreign material can be qualified as an insertion in the sense of [Joh02] and [Woh09], rather than as a borrowing. When discussing verbs, we will have a look at earlier, Soviet era borrowings as well, used by speakers bilingual in Georgian and Russian.