This study investigates the role of prosody in narration as a function of Labovian narrative structure and stancetaking in identity performance. This study is both an extension and enhancement of preliminary work that looked at a handful of prosodic features in Mexican Spanish narratives, and a novel investigation into discursive acts expressed…

This dissertation documents and analyzes phonetic and phonological features of Gua, an under-documented, understudied and nearly-endangered Guang language, spoken in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The language has two dialects, Anum and Boso. The data for this dissertation is from the Boso dialect spoken in the Boso community. The dissertation…

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

Many languages have processes which lengthen or shorten a vowel or consonant. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Open Syllable Lengthening, Closed Syllable Shortening, Monosyllabic Lengthening and Trochaic Lengthening, and present a formal model which captures these lengthenings and shortening as the insertion, deletion or reassignment of a…

This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of…

This dissertation is an investigation of acoustic properties of lexical tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa (Athabaskan). The noteworthy mirror-image tone systems of the H-marked Doig and L-marked Halfway dialects provide a unique opportunity to explore intrinsic differences in how pitch manifests in specific environments. The dissertation has three…

This dissertation has two complementary objectives. First, the present study provides a contemporary reading of "hispanista" research about Mexican Spanish, including Chicano Spanish. In addition, this dissertation presents an overview and analysis of intonational findings of both Mexican Spanish (from the Los Altos region in Jalisco)…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

Richards (2006, 2010) suggests that wh-movement is prosodically driven. Based on the position of the Comp(lementizer) and the marking of prosodic phrase edges, he claims that if Comp is on one side and the language marks the opposite side of prosodic phrases, then the wh-phrase does not move since Comp and wh-phrase can create a prosodic wh-domain…

Despite the importance of speech naturalness to treatment outcomes, little research has been done on what constitutes speech naturalness and how to best maximize naturalness in relationship to other treatment goals like intelligibility. In addition, previous literature alludes to the relationship between prosodic aspects of speech and speech…

This dissertation is about what prosody contributes to dialogue interpretation. The view of prosody developed in this account is based on detailed quantitative investigations of the prosodic forms and interpretations of cue word and declarative responses, specifically with respect to the distribution and interpretation of terminal pitch rises.…

The phonetics and phonology of the Kyungsang dialect of Korean is distinct from those of the standard Seoul dialect with regard to segments and lexical pitch. However, whether the distinctive phonetics and phonology of Kyungsang Korean are maintained by younger speakers is questionable due to the increased exposure to Seoul Korean and the…

Gumuz is a Nilo-Saharan dialect cluster spoken in the river valleys of northwestern Ethiopia and the southeastern part of the Republic of the Sudan. There are approximately 200,000 speakers, the majority of which reside in Ethiopia. This study is a phonological and grammatical analysis of two main dialects/languages: Northern Gumuz and Southern…

In Spanish, each uttered phrase, depending on its use, has one of a variety of intonation patterns. For example, a phrase such as "Maria viene manana" "Mary is coming tomorrow" can be used as a declarative or as an absolute interrogative (a yes/no question) depending on the intonation pattern that a speaker produces. …

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, the rapid liberalization and democratization of Taiwan has led to the transformation of its political structure from a single-party system to a full-fledged two-party system. Along with this political opposition are the two contrastive concepts, the North and the South. Located in this background, this…