#prosody

[prokopetz]

Shout out to the Mountain Goats for reminding us that an awkward pause can be a metrical foot if you believe.

[zolabeano]

this meme but for linguistics

[red-hibiscus]

Please help me with my research!! Looking for participants!

Hello! I am a computation linguistics masters student. I am doing my capstone/thesis on comparing japanese and spanish prosody (intonation, rhythm, melody). I'm in search native japanese and spanish speakers (please share if you don't speak either!!). Don't need to be native in both, just one is fine.

Here is the link to the linktree that contains the surveys. The linktree also contains the information you see above.

For the non-japanese/spanish speakers: the flyers are explaining what I wrote above. Plus extra information about what the survey entails. Basically participants have to record themselves answering silly little questions like "what is your favorite movie and why?". Should take people about 20 minutes. It's possible it could take less.

Also! This has been approved by my school's IRB (institutional review board) and I will do my best to keep all the data safe. The only person who will be listening to the audio is myself. All the questions I ask are either for communication reasons, or for demographic/dialect reasons that might be important in regards to prosody. It's not much. It's a short survey I promise.

Once again, please (!!) participate, and if you cannot, please reblog. If you personally know of native japanese/spanish speakers, please send them this post or the linktree!! I need as many participants as possible.

Thank you so much!! (further rant about linguistic stuff and what I'm actually doing with this under the cut for you language nerds who may be curious)

So the kind of petty motivation for this is that I wanted to A. do research that doesn't involve english, and B. doesn't involve LLMs/AI like 90% of the department lmao. So with this study I'm using parselmouth, praat script, transcription tools, montreal forced aligner, etc to extract features, and word tokens to then analyze. Which is basically my goal for this degree. Gain computational skills that I can use to do more linguistics stuff.

The linguistic motivation is that I've always been fascinated by how languages sound on a more abstract level, not just phonetically/acoustically. Different languages feel like they have a certain tone and melody to me. It's part of why I grew interested in linguistics in the first place, and why my phonetics courses were my favorite classes. The answer to my questions was prosody. One of the slightly lesser studied and probably more argued over fields. I was lucky enough to get admitted into a university where there's a whole lab (and more recently class(es)) on prosody. My research is loosely based off of the work I do in the lab.

As for why Spanish and Japanese... Well it's partially bc after English, they're the two languages I know the most about and have the most connections to. I am a first (?) gen latino immigrant, and minored in japanese in undergrad (plus am pretty active in the local taiko scene). As a spanish speaker, the basic japanese pronunciation was ridiculously easy. I've heard lots of japanese people say the same about spanish. For the most part, spanish and japanese do share a lot of their phonetic inventory. There's a few sounds that don't align. A lot of them being allophones on japanese's side. There's the whole consonant clusters in spanish as well. etc etc. But phonetically speaking, there is a reason why speakers of one can pretty easily pick up the pronunciation of the other.

Anywayyy. Personally, the actual prosody of spanish and japanese is pretty different. Japanese has it's pitch accent, spanish has stress accent. If we want to go into timing (and the mess that it is), Japanese is pretty solidly mora timed, and I've seen people argue for both syllable and stress timed for spanish. Personally I say it's complicated, but it's definitely not as stress timed as english.

And then you get to the stuff I want to look into, intonational phrases, pauses, and where they're located in the sentence. What words or parts of speech may trigger phrases. How does that compare between the languages.

There's certainly been research done here. How else would I get my literature review lol. But there's certain aspects I want to look into more deeply. Plus people seem to like studying prosody separately and not cross linguistically (and when they did they didn't quite get at what I wanted). At least in regards to japanese and spanish. My japanese isn't good enough for academic articles so umm, didn't really delve into that side of the academic world, but I did look at papers in spanish as well. Which is where I found all of my cross-linguistic stuff. So here I am satisfying my own curiosity.

[from-my-linguistics-textbook]

i love this genre of academic paper in which the title is a question whose answer is the summary of the paper

[queueniform]

have you ever heard a song so wonderful you wish it were about you?

[noosphe-re]

prosody (n.)

late 15c., prosodie, "the science or craft of versification, the knowledge of the quantities of syllables in poetry and their pronunciation," from Latin prosodia"accent of a syllable," from Greek prosōidia "song sung to music," also "accent mark; modulation of voice," etymologically "a singing in addition to," from pros"to, forward, near" (see pros-) + ōidē "song, poem" (see ode).

Etymonline

[coquelicoq]

i'm reading this book (the poem itself) which is a poetry collection of famous poems in french, german, spanish, portuguese, and italian, rendered into english in a "literal translation", with about a page and a half of scholarly commentary each. the general impetus for this collection was that you can never really get a feel for a poem in translation, you have to be exposed to it in the sounds and rhythms of the language in which it was written, so there's a pronunciation guide at the back so you can attempt to read the poems aloud to yourself even if you don't speak the languages. the first hundred pages or so were french poems, which i did not need to consult the pronunciation guide in order to read, but i've since moved on to the german section and i don't know anything about german pronunciation except that w is pronounced [v]. so i'm having to refer to the pronunciation guide for every single letter which is not in fact giving me any sort of sense of the feel of the original poem. i'm not sure if i should give up and just look at the words silently...it seems like if i keep going i'd eventually start to retain some of the pronunciation information and not need to look it up as often? but man it is a total slog. and even when referring to the guide i know i'm not actually pronouncing any of this like german, it is all a complete approximation. and i can't even attempt the prosody because (despite the fact that there is also a prosody guide) how the hell am i supposed to magically know where the stress goes on all these words? i get that there are rules and patterns but there are also things like "except stress this other syllable if it's a verb with a prefix" ok you're assuming i know enough about german to know which letter arrangements (that look just like all the other letter arrangements to me) are prefixes??? or verbs?? the barrier to entry here seems a bit high. i think i will be able to fake it to some extent with spanish and italian, maybe with portuguese, but german? hmm.

[synticity]

3 4 (#LSA2025) papers to read about syllables, tones, and prosody

Oh my god I'm sorry my "fully not a phonologist" is showing, but I've lumped together these papers because they're about phonology at the level of something bigger than a phoneme - tones, syllables, and prosody / intonation.

Prosodic boundary processing is language-dependent, Shinobu Mizuguchi and Koichi Tateishi. Keywords: prosody, Japanese, English, spontaneous speech, Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT), boundary cues

Tone 3 Sandhi in Mandarin: Productivity and acoustic realization in L1 and L2 speakers, Xiao Dong and Chien-Jer Lin. Keywords: Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi, Phonological Alternations, Second Language Acquisition

Must "big" syllables carry stress in English?, Anya Hogoboom and Lulu Griffin. Keywords: full vowels, closed syllables, stress, English, perception

Accentual phrases in Tagalog intonation and their loose relation to word prosody, Alessa Farinella and Sun-Ah Jun. Keywords: Austronesian languages, Tagalog, intonation, Autosegmental-Metrical Theory, Prosody, Accentual Phrase

I do find the shared themes of like "what even is a syllable" and "how even does stress work" very interesting here! Would be a fun bundle of papers to read for a phonology class contemplating prosody