Event — Conference

Report on the Between Stress and Tone conference

16-18 June 2005
Leiden, the Netherlands

The Between Stress and Tone conference (BeST) took place in Leiden on 16, 17, and 18 of June 2005. The event focused on the typology - i.e., the range of variation - in word-prosodic systems among the languages of the world.

 

The facts

Four perspectives on this topic had been emphasized in the call for papers: the phonetic, phonological, diachronic, and general typological angles. Each of these was represented by an internationally well-known expert. In addition to these four invited presentations, there were 45 more presentations, which had been evaluated using an anonymous double peer-review procedure. Sixteen of these were presented in 30-minute oral slots; the remaining 29 were presented as posters, with a short (4-minute) plenary introduction (précis presentation - see further below).

The attendants included both specialists on prosodic analysis, and specialists on particular languages. BeST was conceived on the assumption that communication between these two groups is essential to the advance of the study of prosodic typology. The event was announced well in advance using posters and announcements on several web-based fora that are consulted by the targeted groups. Participation grants were used to enable researchers from developing countries and PhD students with no access to funding sources to take part. Approximately approximately 95 people, representing 21 different countries, attended the conference.[1] The country represented by the greatest number of participants was the USA.

Highlights and summary

Two radically different approaches to the study of prosody were persuasively presented in the invited presentations. Larry Hyman (University of California at Berkeley) gave a detailed overview of the range of word-prosodic phenomena that are found in the languages of the world. Rather than coming up with a range of categories in which to pigeonhole the phenomena, Hyman focused on the structural properties that distinguish between systems. This data-driven approach contrasted with the theory-driven perspective that was eloquently put forward by Harry van der Hulst (U. of Connecticut). His views are based on the axiom that the sound system of any human language includes a hierarchical structure of headed constituents, which is likely to be reflected in the prosodic system. The descriptive linguist is to discover how this hierarchy is present in a given language. Obviously, this conception constitutes a bias, which holds the potential to distract the researcher from the correct analysis. At the same time, this theory is of great value to the prosodic typology, as it presses on the researcher the need to try to account for uncommon prosodic systems in terms of conceptions that are essential to the analysis of the majority of prosodic systems of the world's languages.

In our recollection of the event, these two presentations - one at the start of conference, the other on the final day - bounded the event, just as they define the field of tension in which typology takes place: informed by theory and challenged by the phenomena. This conflict is essential to the study of prosody, which should be data-driven, while aiming to accommodate new data in terms of well-established theoretical notions.

In addition, the programme offered analyses of the word-prosodic systems of a large number of languages. Jerold Edmondson (U. of Texas) gave a spectacular presentation of voice quality patterns and their interactions with other prosodic phenomena such as lexical tone in Dinka (Sudan), Somali, Amis (Taiwan) and Bai (China), among others. He made excellent use of fibre-optic video images to show how articulators above the vocal folds play an essential role in a several voice-quality contrasts that are traditionally attributed squarely to the vocal fold settings. Among the other papers that were presented, some presented new data on typologically challenging prosodic systems - e.g. Nubi (Uganda), Gumuz (Ethiopia) and Nenets (Russian Federation); others charted language-internal variation and change in prosodic system - in relation to Basque, German, Kammu (Laos), Korean, Swedish and Zapotec (Mexico), among others. Also prominently represented was the issue of the interaction of word-prosodic contrasts with phrase- or utterance-level prosody - in Cairene Arabic, Chimwini (Malawi), Japanese, and Vietnamese, among others.

Outcomes

Awareness of the great diversity among the word-prosodic systems of the world's languages is an important starting point both for theories of prosody in general, and to provide a framework of reference to the linguist analysing the prosodic system of a particular language. BeST show-cased this diversity, and the analytic approaches that are essential to account for them. By doing so, BeST will foster well-informed research of particular prosodic systems, and of prosody in general.

In addition, the journal Phonology - a Cambridge University Press publication - is dedicating a thematic issue to the topic of the conference, in conjunction with BeST. This thematic issue is currently being guest-edited by two of the organizers of BeST, and will appear as one of the 2006 issues (volume 23). While submission was not restricted to participants in BeST, the vast majority of the submissions originated from participants, and it is likely that several of these will appear in the thematic issue. In this way, the organizers of BeST are providing a forum for top-quality research on word-level prosody from a typological angle, and it is likely that this thematic issue will stimulate research in this area in the years to come.

Innovating the format

Every aspect of the organization went perfectly, and there is no need to enumerate them. It is worthwhile, though, to highlight one aspect of the design of the conference - the précis sessions. As explained above, the précis adds a plenary oral component to the poster format. The authors of the 29 posters that were presented at the conference each had the opportunity to prime the attendants to their presentation in a four-minute oral. The précis is very much an oral mode of presentation - because there is so little time, the use of audiovisual aids is necessarily kept to a minimum. To the best of our knowledge, BeST was the first conference in the field of linguistics to use this format of presentation. It was very interesting to see how much several of the presenters could communicate in four minutes. There are several advantages. First, the précis sessions gave all attendants a brief summary of each of the poster presentations. In addition, these summaries were useful as the attendants had to decide which presentations to focus on in the poster session. Also, by attaching an oral component to the poster formant, we limited the perceived difference in status between the oral and poster formats. This is important, because the poster makes it possible to offer a dense programme in a three-day event, while keeping the event plenary throughout.

 

[1] Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chad, The Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Malawi, The Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, and USA.