Björn Köhnlein will give a presentation on "Prosodic and segmental structure at the interface of synchrony and diachrony"

Abstract
Prosody, the structure above the individual sounds of a language (e.g. syllables, stress / foot structure, intonation), often interacts with segmental structure in language change. This talk discusses the complexity of such processes, with a focus on the relationship between vowel height / vowel duration, obstruent voicing, intonational tone, and abstract prosodic categories (syllable structure, foot structure). As I show on the basis of data from Continental West Germanic, such interactions can lead to a variety of innovations in languages: for instance, intonational languages can introduce lexically contrastive tonal contours (similar to tonal languages); some stressed vowels can lengthen while others shorten at the same time; seemingly opaque phonological rules can emerge, as well as apparent cases of subtractive morphology.

The talk also addresses the question how speakers integrate such novel patterns into the grammar. In a nutshell, I shall argue that a more refined set of prosodic representations resolves many emerging problems and helps to improve our understanding of the interface between synchronic and diachronic phonology. The main idea is that prosodic structure can sometimes be retained even after corresponding segmental information has been deleted.