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TZID:Asia/Shanghai
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DTSTART:20170101T000000
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Shanghai:20180514T153000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Shanghai:20180514T173000
DTSTAMP:20180502T073056Z
CREATED:20180502T070221Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180502T073056Z
UID:3699-1526311800-1526319000@linguistics.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Dialect-geographical Acoustic-tonetics: Five disyllabic tone sandhi patterns in cognate words from the Wu dialects of Zhejiang province - Phil Rose (The Australian National University)
DESCRIPTION:The Chomskyan revolution\, focusing on Language as something in speakers’ brains\, has tended to divert attention from the more traditional\, speaker-external view of Language as a shared property of human societies\, with an existence\, and variation\, in space and time. The first study of how words vary as a function of geographical location – Yang Xiong’s Fangyan – appeared early\, in the Han dynasty China of 53 BC. The systematic discipline of Dialect Geography arose much later\, in late 19th century Europe\, ultimately giving rise in the first part of the 20th century to major surveys which plot the distribution of dialectal features in the USA\, Europe and the UK. Chinese dialect surveys of this era usually go unmentioned\, but actually much work has been published\, with accompanying maps. These include both large-scale surveys of whole provinces (Sichuan\, Yunnan\, Hubei\, Hunan\, Jiangsu) as well as smaller-scale surveys of parts of provinces\, e.g. Zhejiang. This talk returns to China\, to investigate the geographical distribution of a phonological feature: tone-sandhi types in the Wu dialects of its east-central Zhejiang province. \nWu dialects show a great variety of citation tone shapes\, the geographical distribution of which has been described for parts of the Wu area. The Wu dialects are probably best known\, however\, for their complex lexical tone sandhi. This often results in tonal shapes for polysyllabic words which can bear a complex\, phonetically opaque relationship to the isolation tones of their constituent morphemes. The complexity of the tone sandhi systems of individual sites is of considerable tonological interest. Tone sandhi data from Zhenhai\, for example\, has been adduced to demonstrate the theoretically important point within autosegmental phonology that tone contour can be copied. And in the early fifties (long before any tone was delinked from its TBU) Tangxi dialect was the first Chinese example of left-to-right tone spreading. \nThe complexity of the tone sandhi also means\, however\, that adequate\, acoustically-based description and analysis of individual sites is time-consuming. Consequently\, the geographical distribution of Wu sandhi characteristics is not well known. The aim of this talk is to document a start. Instead of describing and analyzing individual sites in detail\, its novelty is to adopt a different\, dialect-geographical perspective\, and investigate acoustically the same fragment of the sandhi system over different sites in the Wu area\, using data from ca. 100 speakers recorded in the 70’s 80’s  and 90’s. All the data can be inspected and listened to on the author’s website philjohnrose.net. \nThis talk thus describes sandhi in disyllabic words where the tone on both their constituent morphemes derives from the single Middle Chinese yinping tone la\, and examines how the lexical sandhi shapes for these tonally cognate disyllabic words distributes through selected parts of Zhejiang. This provides an idea of which areas are likely to have the same sandhi\, and this in turn will help in the selection of individual sites for more detailed description. It also is of course the first step in answering the Historical Linguistic question of how the complexity arose in the first place. The data suggest changes in isolation tones\, and different types of dissimilation of the first tone from the word-final tone\, are a possible origin of the observed synchronic variation.
URL:https://linguistics.hku.hk/event/dialect-geographical-acoustic-tonetics-five-disyllabic-tone-sandhi-patterns-in-cognate-words-from-the-wu-dialects-of-zhejiang-province-phil-rose-the-australian-national-university/
LOCATION:Room 7.58\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus\, HKU\, Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:Seminars
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Shanghai:20180521T153000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Shanghai:20180521T170000
DTSTAMP:20180519T041916Z
CREATED:20180519T041916Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180519T041916Z
UID:3712-1526916600-1526922000@linguistics.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Language Structures and Human Prehistory - Jeremy Collins (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics\, Nijmegen)
DESCRIPTION:HKU Linguistics Seminar Series \n\n\nLinguistic data can reveal how people have been migrating and interacting over thousands of years.  Vocabulary data\, for example\, shows how language families such as Indo-European have spread\, and potentially where and when they originated (e.g. Bouckaert et al. 2011).  Linguistic structures (word orders\, phonemes\, grammatical categories and so on) can also be informative about history\, and especially about the history of language contact\, because neighbouring languages often share structures in common even when they are unrelated.  Because of this\, languages often form linguistic areas\, geographical regions where certain structures have come to predominate\, such as tone and numeral classifiers in Southeast Asia (Enfield 2005).\n\n\nThis talk investigates how linguistic structures spread by analysing a database of phonological and phonotactic properties (Donohue et al. 2013).  The analysis reveals the way that languages cluster together in different parts of Eurasia\, showing how languages have been interacting at different times\, and suggesting ways that people have been migrating between linguistic communities.  The method used is from Bayesian phylogenetics\, which is normally used for studying language families (e.g. Dunn et al. 2005) and is put to new use here to describe linguistic areas.\nThe second part of the talk describes an ongoing project with colleagues in the Glottobank project (www.glottobank.org) building an online database of grammatical structures that currently has data for over 1\,000 languages; and how this data collection can be supplemented on a more fine-grained regional scale by fieldwork.
URL:https://linguistics.hku.hk/event/language-structures-and-human-prehistory-jeremy-collins-max-planck-institute-for-psycholinguistics-nijmegen/
LOCATION:Room 4.04\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus\, HKU\, Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:Seminars
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