Department of Linguistics

The Graduate Linguistics Society will be hosting a seminar on December 4, 2023 (9:30-10:30). Dr. Nicholas Rolle (ZAS) will be presenting on “When prosody cultivates segments: The case of tone-driven epenthesis”. The seminar will be conducted on Zoom. The abstract for the talk and Dr. Rolle’s bio are below.

Abstract: “This talk presents on an oft-neglected topic in phonology: the interaction between segments and prosody. This talk argues for a novel segment-prosody interaction ‘tone-driven epenthesis’, defined as the phonological insertion of a vowel in order to host a tone. Under this type of interaction, prosody cultivates a segmental environment best suited for realizing a prosodic target (e.g. a high pitch target). Crucial evidence comes from two African languages Ghomala’ (Cameroon) and Wamey (Senegal/Guinea), both showing that a rising tone on a closed syllable conditions a final epenthetic vowel (e.g. /ɡɔ̌p/ ‘hen’ realized as either [ɡɔ̌p] or [ɡɔ̀pə́]), a process not found in any other tonal context. We shall situate tone-driven epenthesis within the theoretical literature, and show why despite past pronouncements of its impossibility it is actually expected based on standard Autosegmental representations.”

Bio: Dr. Nicholas Rolle is a postdoctoral researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on phonology and its interfaces as well as Africanist linguistics. Individual topics of interest include grammatical tone, segment-tone interaction, areality of phonological systems, and Optimality Theoretic Distributed Morphology (OT-DM). Dr. Rolle holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.