Course Description

This survey course will introduce students to both phenomena and analytic approaches to the phonology and phonetics of tone and intonation in the world’s languages. Throughout the course, there will be an emphasis of direct contact with phenomena via audio recordings, videos, and a mini-fieldwork project. Students will explore the diversity of ways that tone can enter a language—via the lexicon, word-level stress, phonological processes, morphosyntactic marking, and pragmatic interfaces, etc. As students learn about these phenomena, they will also learn the foundations of autosegmental theory and autosegmental-metrical theory for analyzing prosodic phenomena and also get some hands-on experience working with prosodic data in Praat.

Area Tags: Prosody, Phonetics, Phonology, Tone, Intonation, Typology

(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 3:00pm – 4:20pm

Location: ILC S231

Instructor: Kristine Yu

Kristine Yu is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Yu’s research focuses on prosody from the speech signal to grammar and processing. Her work integrates diverse approaches, including fieldwork, experiments, formal language theory, and machine learning. Recent language areas of focus include Samoan, Formosan languages, and African American English. Yu received her BS in Chemistry from Stanford University and her MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of California Los Angeles.