Linguistics Graduate Students Hayley Heaton and Mike Opper will each be giving a talk.

Hayley Heaton will speak on, "Representing American Southern Prosody in the Media."

Abstract:
A case study of two fictional characters in two television series investigates American Southern prosody and introduces prosodic analysis into studies of language and media. Using media to investigate prosody is new to both the fields of prosody and media studies. Media representations are built off of assumed shared knowledge between the producer and the viewer (Bubel & Spitz 2006). Thus, the question becomes what linguistic features are indexical enough to be used to that end. Are prosodic features used by individuals to mark regional identity? If they do use prosody to index region, what features are used? To investigate these questions, this study examines style-shifting in pitch accent and boundary tone type and frequency as well as pitch accent and boundary tone per word measures. The characters both show evidence of prosodic style-shifting, indicating that prosody is playing into their characterizations rather than remaining static throughout the performance. The characters vary their prosody in different ways, one with an emphasis on pitch accents and the other on boundary tones, indicating speaker specific prosodic strategies. Results indicate that Southern prosodic features may be utilized in media representations of dialect.

Mike Opper will speak on "Understanding Phonological Contrast in Bai."

Abstract:
I present the context and a summary my ongoing dissertation research in this talk. My dissertation covers three topics in Bai phonology which are loosely related: the sub-syllabic affiliation of pre-nuclear glides in Bai, ongoing vowel shifts in the southern variety, and ongoing tone mergers in the southern variety. This talk focuses on the first topic, addresses the second topic, and will briefly introduce the third topic if there is time.
The context of previous research on Bai can be summarized as follows. Although the Bai are an ethnic minority in China and their language lacks a well established written tradition, phonological inventories and lexical items for these varieties are fairly well documented. This is perhaps because of the unclear affiliation of Bai within the Sino-Tibetan language family. However, despite the large body of descriptive work on these linguistic varieties, no prior research has presented adequate phonemic analysis.
The fundamental difference between my analysis and prior work is simple. Pre-nuclear glides [j, w, ɥ] in Bai do not form sub-syllabic constituents with nuclear vowels. I show that this approach is particularly appealing due to economy in phonemic analysis, explanatory power for predicting reduplicative and rhyming patterns, and accountability of attested and unattested syllables. Furthermore, discrepancies in the inventories of nuclear vowels across dialect descriptions can be understood as ongoing vowel shifts through my proposal.