Freie Universität Berlin

Presentation_Segmental phonology

Quicklinks:

Webex Room: weekly live seminars Mo. 16:00–18:00
Schedule: weekly readings, videos and homework
Course Bibliography

Next Homework

Next Videos:

Morphology I
Morphology II
Morphology III

Updates

The usual updates are here. Everything is linked above or in the syllabus. Homework is updated with answers. The transfer tasks are going very well! Good job and keep up the good work. Below, as usual, there is more tasty linguistics for all of you who can’t get enough.

Bonus

Some of you have troubles with hearing and imagining vowel sounds. Here is a fun tool to play with. You can move around the tongue and see what happens. You can also make consonants.

Maybe a bit late, but you were asking for a good way to enter IPA characters.
Click here for an open source project that allows you to type IPA by clicking on the chart. Then, all you have to do is copy/paste. I am planning on a video  (eventually) to demonstrate some other good ways to handle IPA characters, but meanwhile, this is enough for most people.

Rhythm: If you have ever wondered why English is full of schwas (ə), you might find it interesting to look at rhythm. There is a strong connection between English weak forms and its stress-timed rhythm. This video has a decent explanation, but few examples. Unfortunately, most other videos I’ve found on the subject get the linguistics behind it horribly wrong (if you find something nice, let me know). You can search for more information with the keywords: stress-timed, syllable-timed, English weak forms.

We usually don’t have the time to get into it during this class, but it is very interesting for those of you who want to improve their accent. As a German speaker, you might not be aware of weak forms and as a native speaker of Spanish, Russian, or French, practicing stress-timed rhythm might improve your accent a lot. Or maybe you want to improve your Spanish and need syllable-timed rhythm in your life. 😉

Bonus bonus: Frank Zappa—The Dangerous Kitchen
This song is not only hilarious and extremely difficult to learn and play even for expert musicians, but it is also a nice demonstration of the innate rhythm of English. Zappa wrote it to sound more like casual conversation than singing. You can see very nicely which syllables are long and which are short if you know the absolute basics of reading sheet music (the more bars on the notes, the shorter!). At least in the weird talky bits.

Dear all,

thank you for participating in the live session of our seminar. The presentation can be found, as every week, in the folder very practically called Presentations. In preparation for the next week’s session, please do the following:

1. Read the following text: Bieswanger & Becker (2017: 75-95), i.e. Chapter 5, Morphology. 
2. Watch the following three videos on Phonology.
   • (Phonology to) Morphology I
   • (Phonology to) Morphology II
   • (Phonology to) Morphology III
3. Have a look at the sheet with your new homework tasks. You can find it on the Blackboard page of this seminar in the Course material/Homework folder.
4. If you feel like it, fill out this feedback form.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at any time!

Best wishes,

Martin

Update: In the original post, the link to the feedback form lead to the old form. It’s updated now. Sorry about that…

Dear all,

In preparation for week 5, please

1. read Bieswanger & Becker 2017: chapter 4 (pp. 75-95)
2. watch the following videos
   • (Phonology to) Morphology I
   • (Phonology to) Morphology II
   • (Phonology to) Morphology III
3. and do the homework (PDF in the Dropbox). There are many recap questions this time, because my colleagues and I changed the content around between this week and next quite a bit and I lost track somewhere. Sorry about that! If you don’t have time for everything, pick those tasks that look interesting to you!

There’s impulses for discussion in the forum as well — please make at least one post somewhere in the course of the week!

Dear all,

For our next session:

1. Please watch the following videos: phonology I, phonology II, phonology III;
2. Read Bieswanger & Becker 2010: 58-73 and Plag et al. 2009: 29-65.
3. Watch the following video about the “dark” and “light” [l] in English;
4. Watch the following video about the “flap t” and “flap d” in American English;
5. Solve the new homework;
6. Complete the exercise we started in the class;

Here is this week’s presentation about varieties/phonetics and answers to the homework for session 3.

Have a nice week!

Magdalena