Kristine Yu writes:
I'm delighted to announce that our very own Noah Constant will be giving a talk on Tuesday, 11/13 at 3:45pm in the Partee Room on part of his dissertation work. His abstract follows below. Please join us!
Refreshments will be served.
Title: The Prosody of English Contrastive Topic
In this talk, I give a phonological account of English contrastive topic (CT) constructions, as in (1), where the subject displays a CT intonation contour.
(1) Where do the grad students live?
MOST of them... live in NORTHAMPTON.
L+H* L- H% H* L- L%
I will review the means different languages use for marking CT, and situate my account of English within a framework that can make sense of the cross-linguistic facts. In particular, the account seeks to explain (a) where CT meaning is encoded, (b) why CT's are often dislocated to an initial position, and (c) how the presence of a CT can affect prosodic structure.
