Amalia Arvaniti is the Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Radboud University. She had previously held professorial appointments at the University of Kent, UK and the University of California, San Diego. Arvaniti’s research covers prosody, and focuses particularly on the production and perception of intonation and speech rhythm. Her research takes a cross-linguistic perspective, covering several languages that include English, Greek, Korean, Polish, and Romani.

Dr. Arvaniti will be joining us via Zoom.

Title:
How to tame your intonation: from concepts to methods and back

Abstract:
In this talk I will provide a brief overview of the major findings and conclusions of SPRINT, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council to study intonation in English and Greek. The main objective of SPRINT has been to develop a new approach to intonation based primarily on the investigation of intonation variability and pragmatics. SPRINT started from the position that intonation is not a “half-tamed savage”, as the frequently used (and highly questionable) metaphor of Bolinger’s has it, but part of a language’s phonological component whose phonetic features are as tame as any other aspect of speech production, provided a) we treat them as such and b) we employ suitable methodologies to study them. Starting from this position, in the talk, I cover three topics: a) the main sources of variability in intonation and the methodologies employed in SPRINT to address them, so we can distinguish systematic, linguistically determined variation, from gradience, and noise; b) the role that meaning can play in this process; c) the lessons we learned from researching these topics and the ways they have shaped the main SPRINT objective, determining what we retain from AM, the most widely adopted model of intonation, and what we need to revise. Overall, the findings support SPRINT’s starting point and provide encouraging results on which to build this new foundation.