Prosody

As a phonologist, I specialize in prosody, the area of phonology studying pitch, quantity, prominence, intonation, and rhythm. In prosody, my research focuses on stress, tone, syllable weight, and their interaction in natural language and poetic meter.

My work on the typology of tone-stress interaction argues that de Lacy (2002)’s influential theory undergenerates, since it fails to capture attested patterns of tone–stress interaction. At the same time, the theory overgenerates, predicting patterns that are unattested and, arguably, counterintuitive, particularly in the realm of contour tones. I propose a revised model that resolves both issues.

In a forthcoming Phonology paper, I document and analyze a typologically unusual word minimality constraint found in many South Slavic dialects, where the minimal permissible word shape is determined not only by standard size indicators such as syllable count and vowel length, but also by the word’s tonal profile. This pattern has major implications for prosodic typology and for formal Optimality-Theoretic models of phonology.

In collaboration with Kevin Ryan, I investigate complex prosodic interactions in oral folk meter. We show that stress can interact simultaneously with both weight and tone. This finding expands the attested typology of prosodic regulation in metered verse, showing that meters can display multiple interactive mappings in parallel, and that stress-tone interaction, previously undocumented in metrical traditions, is indeed possible in meter, just like in ordinary language.

Effects of pitch accent (stress and tone) and syllable weight in South Slavic folk meter.

My dissertation examines the effects of prosodic factors such as word size, vowel length, and syllable structure on word order. I am particularly interested in the so-called end weight effects, whereby longer/heavier elements tend to be preferred at the end of larger prosodic constituents (e.g. apples and oranges > oranges and apples).