Standard prosody or prosody of linguistic standards?

Prosodic variation and grammar writing

 

 

Date: 28-Feb-2007 - 2-Mar-2007

Location: Siegen, Germany

Contact: Jörg Peters ( j.peters@let.ru.nl)

 

 

 

Meeting description

 

With the advances of prosodic theory in the last few decades, descriptive grammars have paid more and more attention to prosody. Encyclopaedic grammars like the Comprehensive grammar of the English language (Quirk et al. 1985) and the 7th edition of the Dudengrammatik (2005) even devote entire chapters to prosody. Those grammars claim to describe national standard languages, which are codified in written language. Prosody, however, is only partly codified, if at all. The question arises whether there is nonetheless a standard prosody shared by all speakers of a national standard language on which grammars can be built. Until the mid 90s of the last century, prosodic research mainly dealt with standard languages, using impressionistic judgements or a few speakers of the standard language as their data source. In the last decade, prosodic variation has become one of the fastest-growing topics, especially in Autosegmental Phonology and in spoken language research. The findings in these research areas challenge the view that there is a single standard prosody shared by all speakers of a standard language. One of the tasks of prosodic research, therefore, will be to examine how much variation is involved in the prosody used by speakers of national standard languages, and, more generally, to examine the implications prosodic variation has for grammatical description.

 

Invited speakers

 

Caroline Féry (University of Potsdam)

Peter Gilles (University of Luxembourg)

Carlos Gussenhoven (University of Nijmegen)

Klaus J. Kohler (University of Kiel)

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Papers on all topics related to prosodic variation and the relevance of prosody for grammar writing are welcome. In particular, we encourage contributions to

- the prosody of standard and non-standard varieties

- regional, social and stylistic variation of prosody

- syntactic structure and prosodic variation

- the modelling of prosody as part of grammars.

 

Presentations will be 20 minutes long followed by a 10-minute question period. The language of the workshop will be English.

 

The workshop will be part of the Annual Meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS).

 

 

SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS

 

Abstracts should be in English and fit on one page (using 2.5 cm margins on each side, 1.2 line spacing, and 12pt font size). The abstract should include the following information: author's name(s), affiliation, email address, and title of abstract.

 

All abstracts must be submitted as PDF documents. If you encounter a problem creating a PDF file, please contact us for further assistance.

 

Please send your submission electronically to all three organizers (see below).

 

 

IMPORTANT DATES

 

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 August 2006

Notification of acceptance: 15 September 2006

Final programme: 15 December 2006

Workshop: 28 February - 2 March 2007

 

Workshop program and abstracts

 

The workshop program is available at http://www3.uni-siegen.de/fb3/dgfs2007/ags/prog-ag-07.html?lang=en

 

Abstracts can be downloaded here.

 

Organizing comittee

 

Jörg Peters (j.peters@let.ru.nl)

Margret Selting (selting@uni-potsdam.de)         

Marc Swerts (M.G.J.Swerts@uvt.nl)