The Fifth Annual
SLUgS Symposium

Abstracts

Yuni Kim | Segmental and autosegmental aspects of Huave glottal fricatives

This talk is about the phonological representation of the glottal fricative [h] in Huave, a language isolate of Oaxaca State, Mexico. Several facts suggest that Huave has two kinds of [h]: a “normal” consonant on the one hand, and on the other, an autosegmental feature that usually belongs to (or docks on) the vowel nucleus. I propose that the two [h]’s actually have the same featural content—the feature [+spread glottis]—and show how this analysis accounts for the phonological interactions of the [h]’s with each other and with other segments, as well as simplifying the description of the morphology.

Stephanie Shih | “Sing Me A Swing Song”: Modeling the metrical structure of rhythm in jazz bop swing

Jackendoff and Lerdahl’s grid-based theory of modeling musical intuitions of rhythm (GTTM 1983)—based on Western classical music—has formed the foundation for current research on musical rhythm, which has also primarily focused on classical music. When extended to non-classical forms, the GTTM grid theory is too limited to accurately model and fully capture musical intuitions governing the cognition of rhythm. From evidence in jazz bop swing, a form whose rhythm is perceptibly distinct from that of classical music, this paper develops revisions on the current theory for describing musical rhythm which are influenced by approaches in describing linguistic rhythm.

Using data from Ella Fitzgerald recordings, I generate a metrical model of jazz rhythm that departs from GTTM’s model in three significant ways. First, the polyphonic texture of jazz necessitates the existence of two metrical models which together capture jazz’s rhythmic form, though these models are similar in many ways and may be reconciled as one. Second, evidence from jazz supports an argument that musical rhythm, like linguistic rhythm, involves the metrical features of culminativity and constituency. This argument leads to the use of a tree-based model for representing rhythm as opposed to GTTM’s grid-based model, which fails to illustrate constituency structure. Third, unlike the binary metrical model hitherto used to describe musical rhythm, jazz rhythm requires ternary metrical structure, like anapestic meters, accounting for both the seemingly uneven rhythm of swing and jazz’s conflict between stressing phrasal beginnings and metrically prominent beats.

This model of jazz rhythm describes more metrical relationships present in both music and language than possible in the GTTM model, allowing for more flexibility and comprehensiveness in describing listeners’ intuitions of musical rhythm.

References:

• Halle, John and Fred Lerdahl. 1993. “A Generative Textsetting Model.” Current Musicology. 55: 3-23.
• Hayes, Bruce. 2005. “Textsetting as Constraint Conflict.” (submitted) Typology of Poetic Forms. ed. Jean-Louis Aroui. <http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Textsetting/HayesTextsettingAsConstraintConflict.pdf>
• Jackendoff, Ray and Fred Lerdahl. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Prince, Alan. 1989. “Metrical Forms.” Phonetics and Phonology: Volume 1, Rhythm and Meter. Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc.

Kashmiri Stec | Wørd: Mental Spaces & Blends in the Colbert Report

Life is a multi-modal experience, and we are multi-modal critters who process and understand the world according to whatever information we can wrap our brains around. We can cut the world up along the lines of each of the five senses: sight, sound, taste, scent and touch. People are good—really, really good—at integrating multiple inputs and multiple modes into a cohesive whole. Although we can attend to each input separately, what we usually experience as embodied critters is their integration, not their individuality.

One of the central aims of Cognitive Science and Cognitive Linguistics is to accurately describe and model that integration, whether it be the unification of wavelengths of light, photoreceptors and basic colour lexemes (Berlin and Kay 1969), of mirror neurons and action chains (Gallese and Lakoff 2005), of gesture and speech (McNeill 1992; Smith 2003) or of multi-media/mode presentations (Mayer 1997; Narayan 2000).

In this paper, I investigate the latter. My primary concern is with how people can make sense of television fake news broadcasts, both in terms of the broadcasts themselves, and in terms of our ability to situate and understand those broadcasts within a larger political context. Using Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory, McNeill’s theory of gesture, and Narayan 2000’s work on comics, I show how these multiple levels of meaning arise in several instances of the Wørd segment, in Comedy Centrals The Colbert Report. My claim is that this segment, and TV in general, can be analysed as a “dynamic” comic, and that there are minimally 4 types of blends exemplified in the Wørd: Grammatical Slot, Elaboration, Conversations, and meta-Conversations.