CRL Talks

Talks are every Tuesday at 4:00pm in CSB 280.

Join us in the CRL lab, CSB 215, for happy half-hour at 3:30pm.

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November 24, 2009

Language-specific and universal patterns of accentuation and narrow focus marking in Romani

Amalia Arvaniti

In this talk I present a first sketch of the intonation and rich accentuation and focus marking devices of Komotini Romani, a variety of Vlach Romani spoken in Thrace, the northeast region of Greece. The analysis is based on data from spontaneous conversations and story-telling involving several Romani speakers. These data show that Komotini Romani uses two cross-linguistically unusual features to mark focus. First, focus can be indicated by a non-metrically motivated stress-shift. Second, changes in accentuation are frequently co-produced with word order changes, the focus particle da (borrowed from Turkish), or stress-shift, while several of these devices can be used concurrently on occasion. These data show that focus marking strategies additional to those already known may be available cross-linguistically, such as the stress-shift of Romani. In addition, Romani can be added to the small number of languages that have a large repertoire of focus markers and tend to use them concurrently. In this respect, these data argue against a strong interpretation of the “minimality condition” recently proposed by Skopeteas & Fanselow (to appear) regarding focus marking strategies, according to which less complex structures are preferred to more complex ones (if both available in a given language) following a markedness scale from lightest to most structurally complex: in situ (prosody) < reordering < cleft. Komotini Romani clearly does not follow this scale, marking focus both prosodically and syntactically (or morphologically) on most occasions. Nevertheless, clefting is indeed extremely rare in this variety. I argue that this is because the possibilities afforded Romani by the combination of prosodic devices and word-order changes make clefting unnecessary, thus indirectly validating the scale of Skopeteas & Fanselow.

Fall 2009 Schedule
October 6	Fore-words: Prediction in language comprehension Kara Federmeier (University of Illinois)
October 13	Structural Commonalities in Human and Avian Song Adam Tierney
October 20	The Electrophysiology of Speech Production: “It Is Time, Time Matters.” Kristof Strijkers (University of Barcelona / University Pompeu Fabra)
October 27	What can ERPs and fMRI tell us about language comprehension? Streams of Processing in the Brain Gina Kuperberg (Tufts University, Department of Psychology; Department of Psychiatry, Mass General Hospital; Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging)
November 3	Do Comprehenders Benefit When Their Interlocutors Repeat Their Labels and Structures? Victor Ferreira
November 10	The relationship between sound and meaning in spoken language Lynne Nygaard (Emory University)
November 17	ERP Studies of Sarcasm Comprehension Seana Coulson
November 24	Amalia Arvaniti
December 1	Elin Runnqvist (University of Barcelona and University Pompeu Fabra)

Past Talks

Technical Information

Our projector has a native resolution of 1280x800, also known as WXGA full. This is the resolution of most modern widescreen personal computers with 12- to 13-inch displays. For best results, design your presentations using this resolution and/or aspect ratio (16:10). When you connect your personal computer to our projector (using the standard VGA connector), make sure you set the resolution of the external display to 1280x800. Please bring any necessary video adapter in order to plug in our standard (blue) 9-pin VGA connector from our projector. We do not have a supply of video adapters on hand.

Request Equipment

Please use our Technical Support Contact Form if you are planning on connecting any devices other than your notebook computer. We can convert VHS or DVD video to a portable digital format playable on your computer, but this requires at least 48 hours lead time. Feel free to use this form if you have any questions about our new projection system.