You are cordially invited
Björn Köhnlein (Ohio State)
“Genesis and typology of tonal oppositions in Dutch and German dialects”
Monday, November 15, 2021
4:00-5:30pm
Mendenhall Lab 125
In certain Dutch and German dialects, there is an opposition between two word tones, so-called Accent 1 and Accent 2. Roughly, speakers of relevant dialects can distinguish two types of words based on their respective tonal melodies. For instance, in the dialect of Arzbach, the word meaning ‘pigeon’ and the word meaning ‘baptism’ are segmentally identical (both pronounced as [dauf]), but speakers can still distinguish them based on differences in their tonal melodies: ‘pigeon’ is produced with a high-level tone, and ‘baptism’ with a falling tone. Curiously, other dialects usually have opposite tonal melodies: For instance, in Mayen (20 miles away from Arzbach), ‘pigeon’ is produced with a falling tone, and ‘baptism’ is produced with a level tone, thus the exact opposite of Arzbach – notably, this reversal does not only hold for isolated words, but for the whole vocabulary. In this talk, I discuss how a tone contrast could develop in languages that typically do not have tonal oppositions, and how Arzbach developed opposite tones than the other dialects. In doing so, my presentation addresses broader questions regarding the development of the Germanic languages, as well as regarding the genesis and typology of tonal contrasts.
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Björn Köhnlein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His core expertise is phonology – particularly interactions of metrical structure, (intonational) tone, and segmental structure – and its interfaces with phonetics and morphology, from both a synchronic and a diachronic typological perspective. His current primary focus is on so-called tone accent languages that combine word stress and tonal distinctions (such as Franconian, Lithuanian, or Swedish). In his research, he combines elements from historical linguistics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, and dialectology with phonological theory, often based on original fieldwork.