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Graduate Student Colloquium

Jiseung Kim & Ariana Bancu
Friday, December 9, 2016
4:00-5:30 PM
3254 LSA Building Map
Graduate Students Jiseung Kim and Ariana Bancu from the Department of Linguistics with present at this colloquium.

Jiseung Kim: "Prosodic accommodation as a driver of sound change: accommodation in Seoul Korean Accentual Phrase"

Abstract
The goal of this study is to examine prosodic accommodation, specifically testing accommodation at prosodic boundaries for speakers of Seoul Korean. Twenty-five native speakers of Seoul Korean participated in a sentence completion task where they were asked to complete a target sentence after reading (in the baseline condition) or listening to (in the test condition) a context sentence. In both cases, participants completed the sentence by speaking. The control group consisted of 11 participants who were given the auditory context sentences with unmanipulated Seoul Korean prosody. The auditory context sentences provided to the 14 test group participants had artificially manipulated prosody. The manipulation lowered the f0 of the phrase-final syllables that were associated with the Accentual Phrase-final rise, which is a characteristic intonational property of Seoul Korean. The f0 values – f0 maximum, minimum, mean, and range – were extracted from the AP-final syllables of the participants’ responses, and were compared between the baseline and test conditions. The results of the linear mixed-effects model analysis on the nine test group participants showed evidence of convergence, while ten control group participants did not show accommodation effect. The results suggest that prosodic accommodation may provide insight into the current diversity of prosodic systems among Korean dialects.

Ariana Bancu: “Word order Variation and Change in Transylvanian Saxon.”

Abstract
This research illustrates word order variation in Viscri Saxon (a dialect of Transylvanian Saxon spoken in Viscri Romania) and accounts for the variation within a language contact framework (c.f. Thomason, 2001). To show that verb cluster structures transferred into Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax) through German, I compare current data collected through sociolinguistic interviews to evidence from previous studies on TrSax (Holzträger, 1912; McClure 1973; Sift, 2015), and to data from related West Germanic languages. Overall, findings show that verb clusters pattern differently in Viscri Saxon than in related dialects and languages, displaying flexible distribution between available structures in various areas. The distribution is conditioned by the languages in contact with Viscri Saxon: German and Romanian. While verbal structures transferred from German into Viscri Saxon, Romanian may aid in maintaining the TrSax patterns in Viscri Saxon, due to similarities between TrSax and Romanian structures. The individual variation displayed among speakers strengthens these findings, as variation is present only in speakers who use all three languages regularly. One speaker, who does not use Romanian, uses only German-type structures, however another speaker, who does not use German, uses only TrSax structures.
Building: LSA Building
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: AEM Featured, colloquium, Discussion, Language
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Linguistics