Research

 

Introduction to my research interests

My main research interests revolve around prosodic phonology, from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. I am particularly interested in the interaction between word-level metrical structure, (intonational) tone, and segmental structure, with a particular focus on the interfaces with phonetics and morphology. From a theoretical perspective, my research addresses questions such as the following:

  • How do speakers implement prosodically conditioned phonological patterns into the grammar?
  • How is unpredictable prosodic information stored in the lexicon?
  • How do prosodic patterns change over time, and what consequences can this have for the synchronic phonology?

The empirical fundament for this research program is a tone accent opposition in Franconian (spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands), which has been the topic of my Ph.D. thesis (2011); currently, I am revising my thesis for the series Studies in Germanic Linguistics, published by the Ohio State University Press (on invitation by the editors). Roughly, the notion ‘tone accent’ entails that speakers of such varieties combine prototypical features from stress systems and tone systems. On the one hand, speakers of Franconian can use diverse tonal melodies to differentiate the meanings of words, which makes the phenomenon similar to what we find in tone languages like Mandarin. On the other hand, the contrasts are restricted to stressed syllables and often enhanced by durational and / or segmental cues, which is similar to what we find in stress languages like Dutch or German. Tone accent oppositions are always binary, i.e., there are never more than two accents; consider, for instance, the minimal pair [máń] ‘basket’ (Accent 1, high level tone, relatively longer duration) vs. [máǹ] ‘man’ (Accent 2, falling tone, relatively shorter duration) from Arzbach Franconian (pronunciation in isolation).

To shed new light on the Franconian tone accent opposition, my thesis approaches the issue from various angles: first of all, I have conducted in-depth studies on the production and perception of the opposition in a crucial but previously underdescribed dialect area. On the basis of my findings and previous literature on the subject, the thesis then develops novel diachronic and synchronic typological analyses of the accent contrast across four different dialect areas. After my Ph.D., I have elaborated on the analyses proposed in my thesis, as evidenced in papers on synchronic (Köhnlein forthcoming a; Köhnlein forthcoming b) and diachronic aspects (Köhnlein 2013, Köhnlein 2015, Köhnlein forthcoming c) of the interactions.

From a theoretical perspective, one of the cornerstones of my work on tonal accent is the claim that the respective tonal oppositions do not necessarily have to be derived from the presence of tone in the lexicon, as has long been the standard assumption in theoretical phonology (e.g. Gussenhoven 2000, 2004; Peters 2006 for Franconian; Riad 1996, 2013; Kristoffersen 2000; Lahiri et al. 2005; Wetterlin 2010 for Scandinavian). Rather, I pursue the idea that in Franconian, certain metrical contrasts – differences between two types of feet – are expressed on the surface by means of a diverse association of predictable, intonational tones (there is no tonal information in the lexicon). That is, the tonal patterns in Franconian derive from intonational pitch accents and boundary tones only, similar to intonational languages like English. Franconian, however, has more-fine-grained contrasts in the metrical organization of words than English. Because of these metrical contrasts, intonational tones associate to two types of words in different ways, leading to the tonal surface opposition between Accent 1 and Accent 2.

As discussed in Köhnlein (forthcoming a), external evidence for my claims comes from various sources, such as morphological alternations and interactions of tonal accent with vowel length / duration, vowel quality, and obstruent voicing. This metrical approach, as I refer to it in opposition to the traditional tonal approach (based on tone in the lexicon), is relatively recent, but my work is not isolated: related work on Franconian can be found in Hermans (2009, 2012), Kehrein (forthcoming); Van Oostendorp (forthcoming), and similar proposals have been made for accentual oppositions in e.g. Scandinavian (Morén 2005, 2007; Morén-Duolljá 2013), or Scottish Gaelic (Iosad forthcoming).

In my current and future research, I aim to extend the scope of my proposals, for instance with respect to the cross-linguistic typological implications of my synchronic and diachronic approach. Köhnlein (2013) explicitly addresses typological issues from a diachronic perspective: by comparing tonal developments in Franconian, Scandinavian, and Serbo-Croatian, the paper provides evidence for a set of principles of tonal change in tone accent languages. In Köhnlein (forthcoming c), I investigate the diachronic development of the relationship between tone and duration in different accentual languages (Franconian, Estonian, North Low Saxon). I also work on synchronic metrical analyses of tone accent oppositions in languages other than Franconian; recent examples of this line of work is Köhnlein (in preparation) for the Mayan language Uspanteko, or Köhnlein (in revision) for Estonian. I aim combine such theoretical studies with experiments on the interaction of prosodic structure and segmental structure in speech production and perception.

From a broader perspective, a central question underlying this research is in which way understanding the phonological nature of tonal accent can help to improve our general knowledge about the synchronic organization and diachronic dynamics of prosodic systems. This directly relates to the study of prosodic typology, one of the most controversial topics in current phonological theory (cf. Hyman 2006, 2009; Beckman & Venditti 2010a, b; Van der Hulst 2011, 2012; Hualde 2012, among others).

Next to my work on the interaction of tone, metrical, and segmental structure, I have also published on the linguistic structure of names (forthcoming d) and the relevance of poetic rhyme for phonological theory (Köhnlein & Van Oostendorp 2014).

 

References

Beckman, M.E. & J.J. Venditti. 2010a. Tone and Intonation. In W. J. Hardcastle & J. Laver (eds.), The handbook of phonetic sciences, 2nd ed, 603-652. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Beckman, M.E. & J.J. Venditti. 2010b. Intonation. In J. Goldsmith, J. Riggle & A.C.L. Yu (eds.), The handbook of phonological theory, 2nd ed, 485-532. Wiley: Blackwell.

de Vaan, M. (ed.). 2006. Germanic Tone Accents. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Franconian Tone Accents, Leiden, 13-14 June 2003. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik – Beiheft 131. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Gussenhoven, C. 2000. The lexical tone contrast of Roermond Dutch in Optimality Theory. In M. Horne (ed.), Prosody: Theory and Experiment. Amsterdam: Kluwer. 129-167.

Gussenhoven, C. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hermans, B. 2009. The phonological structure of the Limburg tonal accents. In K. Nasukawa & P. Backley (eds.), Strength relations in phonology, 317-372. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Hermans, B. 2012. The phonological representation of the Limburgian tonal accents. In B. Botma & R. Noske (eds.), 227-244.

Hualde, J.I. 2012. Two Basque accentual systems and the notion of pitch-accent language. Lingua 122.13, 1335-1351.

Hulst, H. van der. 2011. Pitch accent systems. In Van Oostendorpet et al (eds.), 1003-1026.

Hulst, H. van der. 2012. Deconstructing stress. Lingua 122.13: 1494-1521.

Hyman, L.M. 2006. Word-prosodic typology. Phonology 23.2. 225-257.

Hyman, L.M. 2009. How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent. Language Sciences 31.2. 213-238.

Iosad, P. Forthcoming. Pitch accent and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic: reassessing the role of contact. In M. Hilpert, J. Duke, C. Mertzlufft, J. Östman & M. Rießler (eds.). New Trends in Nordic and General Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kehrein, W. Forthcoming. There’s no tone in Cologne: against tone segment interactions in Franconian. In Kehrein et al. (eds.).

Kehrein, W., B. Köhnlein, P. Boersma & M. van Oosytendorp (eds.). Forthcoming. Segmental structure and tone. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Köhnlein, B. 2011. Rule reversal revisited: Synchrony and diachrony of tone and prosodic structure in the Franconian dialect of Arzbach. Utrecht: LOT. Dissertation Series 274.

Köhnlein, B. 2013. Optimizing the relation between tone and prominence: Evidence from Franconian, Scandinavian, and Serbo-Croatian tone accent systems. Lingua 131, 1-28.

Köhnlein, B. & Van Oostendorp, M. 2014. The relevance of feminine rhyme for phonological theory. In R. Kager, R. J. Grijzenhout & K. Sebregts (eds.), Where the principles fail. A Festschrift for Wim Zonneveld, 113-121. Utrecht: UIL-OTS.

Köhnlein, B. 2015. A tonal semi-reversal in Franconian dialects: Rule A vs. Rule B. North-Western European Language Evolution (NOWELE) 68.1., 81-112.

Köhnlein, B. Forthcoming a. Contrastive foot structure in Franconian tone accent dialects. Phonology.

Köhnlein, B. Forthcoming b. Synchronic alternations between monophthongs and diphthongs in Franconian: a metrical approach. In: Kehrein et al. (eds.), Segmental structure and tone. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Köhnlein, B. Forthcoming c. An asymmetry in the interaction of pitch and duration. Diachronica 32.2.

Köhnlein, B. Forthcoming d. The morphological structure of complex place names: the case of Dutch. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. DOI 10.1007/s10828-015-9075-0

Köhnlein, B. In preparation. Metrically conditioned pitch accent in Uspanteko.

Köhnlein, B. In revision. Tone accent does not imply lexical tone: revisiting Estonian overlength.

Kristoffersen, G. 2000. The Phonology of Norwegian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lahiri, A., A. Wetterlin & E. Jönsson-Steiner. 2005a. Lexical specification of tone in North Germanic. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 28: 61-96.

Morén, B. 2005. Danish stød and Eastern Norwegian pitch accent: The myth of lexical tones. Talk presented at the 13th Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm 13), Manchester, UK.

Morén, B. 2007. Central Swedish pitch accent: a retro approach. Paper presented at the Fourth Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP4), Rhodes, Greece.

Morén-Duolljá, B. 2013. The prosody of Swedish underived nouns: No lexical tones required. Nordlyd 40:1, 196-248.

Oostendorp, M. van. Forthcoming. Tone, Final Devoicing and Assimilation in Moresnet. In Kehrein et al. (eds.).

Peters, J. 2006. The Cologne word accent revisited. In: de Vaan (ed.), 107-133.

Riad, T. 1996. Remarks on the Scandinavian accent typology. Nordlyd 24: 129-156.

Riad, T. 2013. The phonology of Swedish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wetterlin, A. 2010. Tonal accents in Norwegian: phonology, morphology and lexical specification. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.