CHILL!
Chinese Linguistics in Leiden
Spring 2018
All talks Wednesdays 15:15-16:30, Van Wijkplaats 2, room 006
28 March
Chen Aoju (Utrecht): “Same prominence, different developmental paths: Prosodic focus-marking in children acquiring Mandarin and West Germanic languages”
abstract In both West Germanic languages and Mandarin, speakers distinguish the im-portant information (focus) from the less important informa¬tion (background) in a sentence by pronouncing the focal word with in¬creased prominence via changes in pitch and duration. In this talk, I will show that despite the stri¬king similarities in the prosodic expres¬sion of focus between Mandarin and West Germanic languages, children acquiring these languages differ in both the rate and the order in which they become adult-like in the use of pitch and duration.
18 April
Yang Zhaole (Leiden): “Mandarin yě and scalarity”
9 May
Han Mengru (Utrecht): “Mothers’ use of prosodic prominence in word-learning contexts: evidence from Dutch and Mandarin infant-directed speech”
for comments and suggestions, please contact r.p.e.sybesma@hum.leidenuniv.nl