Conférencier(e)s invité(e)s

Roland Noske (Université de Lille) - Conspiracies and Typological Drift

In this talk, a parallel will be drawn between the evolution Late Latin to Old French (and Western Romance in general) and that of Old High German to Early New High German. A number of at first sight disparate historical processes in High German will be shown to be part of a single prosodic drift. This drift concerns a reorganization of the prosodic system away from the central role of the syllable to that of the prosodic word.

Coming to French, it will be shown that a similar pattern occurred in the evolution from Late Latin towards Gallo-Romance and Old French. The processes that have taken place show a remarkable similarity with those in High German. I will argue that this is not a coincidence, but that also for these processes, the driving force is a changing prosodic system.

Finally, this insight makes it possible to suggest a solution for a longstanding problem in the history of Old French, regarding the chronology of historical processes. The processes in question will be shown to be part of a conspiration and can be assumed to be driven by a single typological force.

Juliet Stanton (New York University) - Postnasal devoicing as contrast enhancement

Postnasal voicing, where an underlying voiceless nasal-stop sequence is mapped to a voiced nasal-stop sequence (NT > ND), is a common process that has a well-known phonetic motivation (e.g. Pater 1999, Hayes & Stivers 2000). The converse of postnasal voicing, postnasal devoicing (ND > NT), is uncommon and often claimed to be phonetically unnatural (e.g. Beguš 2019). In this talk I argue against this characterization by showing that postnasal devoicing is perceptually advantageous. The idea (following Stanton 2017) is that, all else being equal, the contrast between a nasal (N) and ND is less distinct than a contrast between N and NT. Speakers employ post-nasal devoicing as a form of enhancement, in order to render the N-ND contrast more distinct.

Evidence for this claim comes from a perception study, which has two main results. First, the N-NT contrast is more distinguishable than the N-ND contrast, both prevocalically and word-finally. Second, both the N-ND and N-NT contrasts are more distinguishable prevocalically than they are word-finally. I demonstrate that this second finding has parallels in the typology of PND: prevocalic PND entails word-final PND. I present an analysis of PND that references auditory factors and show that it can be easily extended to account for other post-nasal laryngeal alternations, such as post-nasal aspiration (see Downing & Hamann 2021). Time permitting, I discuss points of intersection with and differences between the present proposal and those of Beguš (2019) and Downing & Hamann (2021).

Elisa Fernández Rei (Instituto da Lingua Galega, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) - Hybridations intonatives des variétés du galicien et de l'espagnol en contact en Galice