Öffentlicher Gastvortrag von Bob Ladd am 22.09.2010
"Phonetics of suprasegmental contrasts in Dinka speech and song"
14.09.2010
"Phonetics of suprasegmental contrasts in Dinka speech and song"
Zeit: Mittwoch, 22.09.2010 um 12.00 Uhr
Ort: Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung, Schellingstr. 3, VG, 2. Stock, Raum 226 (Institutsbibliothek).
Abstract
This will be a very informal presentation of some of the work-in-progress on our project on Dinka speech and song (for more information go to http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/nilotic/). Dinka, a Nilotic language spoken by about 2 million people in Southern Sudan, has a rich set of suprasegmental contrasts (two phonemically distinctive voice qualities, three phonemically distinctive vowel quantities, and in most dialects three or four tone phonemes). It also has a lively song tradition: individuals compose and "own" songs praising family members or cattle, insulting rivals or enemies, commemorating important events, and so on. Musically, the melodies are rhythmically and harmonically simple and based on a strictly pentatonic scale. One obvious question for a phonetician is how (if at all) the suprasegmental contrasts are manifested in singing.
The talk will feature audio demonstrations of the suprasegmental contrasts, in semi-isolated words and in utterance context, and of the songs. I will summarise instrumental evidence for the acoustic and/or articulatory basis of these contrasts in speech, and describe our attempts to identify acoustic correlates of the contrasts in song. Our current tentative answer to the obvious question in the previous paragraph ("how are the suprasegmental constrasts manifested in singing?") is that all the contrasts are neutralised, i.e. overridden by the demands of the music. We have been unable to identify any reliable correlates of any of the contrasts in singing. However, this conclusion is somewhat suprising given the high functional load of some of the contrasts, and we would welcome suggestions of other ways we might look at the acoustic data.
Download der Ankündigung (PDF, 53,0 kb)