Professor Amalia Arvaniti and Dr Tamara Rathcke from the Department of English Language & Linguistics have both authored papers in the latest issue of the journal Phonetica, Volume 73, No. 3-4.
Phonetica is an interdisciplinary journal for the research and theory of phonetics. The latest issue, dated February 2017, is a special issue dedicated to ‘Slavic Perspectives on Prosody’ (the study of stress, tone, intonation and rhythm in speech).
In the issue, Professor Amalia Arvaniti has co-authored, along with Dr Marzena Zygis (Centre for General Linguistics and Humboldt University, Berlin) and Dr Marek Jaskuła (West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, Poland), a paper entitled ‘The Phonetics and Phonology of the Polish Calling Melodies’. The intonation of two Polish melodies (short segments of speech) were investigated: the routine call, used to call someone for an everyday reason, and the urgent call, which conveys disapproval of the addressee’s actions. The paper presents results on the phonetic realisation and abstract (phonological) representation of the two melodies, discusses how they fit into the intonation system of Polish, and addresses the repercussions of these findings for cross-linguistic theories of intonation. The article is open access, and so available to all: https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/446001
Dr Tamara Rathcke has authored a paper entitled ‘How Truncating Are “Truncating Languages”? Evidence from Russian and German’. Russian and German have previously been described as ‘truncating’, or cutting off pitch targets at the end of short phrases. However, supporting evidence is rare and limited to only a few pitch categories. Tamara’s paper reports a study conducted to document pitch adjustments to variable linguistic materials, short and long words. The results show that speakers of both languages do not utilise truncation exclusively; on the contrary, they employ several strategies, including compression and temporal re-alignment, as well as truncation, to produce the target pitch categories in words of varied length.
To access the table of contents for the issue, which include links to the full abstracts, please see the journal’s webpage here: www.karger.com/Journal/Issue/273142