Congressus XIV Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum

Symposium B.11: Prosody of Uralic languages


Organizers: Pärtel Lippus, Eva Liina Asu (University of Tartu), Katalin Mády (HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)

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Uralic languages share a number of prosodic features but have also acquired new ones via numerous contacts with typologically unrelated contact languages. While historically Uralic languages are considered to have relatively simple prosody (including fixed word level stress), it has been shown that several of the languages can be characterised by complex interrelations between word and utterance-level prosody as well as between phonological and morphological constraints (see Pajusalu 2022). Uralic languages are often quantity languages, and some Finnic and Saami languages have developed tree-way quantity systems that also include three-way oppositions of consonants. However, this is a late development in all these languages and is therefore realised differently in the respective languages.

On the whole, many more studies have been carried out on the prosody of Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian than on other smaller Uralic languages, many of which are endangered, and proportionally, there are more studies on word prosody (quantity and stress) than on sentence prosody (Pajusalu 2022). The main goal of the symposium is to bring together researchers working on various empirical, typological and/or theoretical questions related to the prosody of Uralic languages. This symposium invites papers on a wide range of prosodic features of Uralic languages, including quantity, stress, rhythm, and intonation, but also microprosody and suprasegmental features of coarticulation, etc. The symposium continues the tradition of Finno-Ugric/Uralic Prosody workshops held in Tartu (2015), Budapest (2017) and Helsinki (2019).

References

Pajusalu, Karl. 2022. Prosody. In Marianne Bakró-Nagy, Johanna Laakso & Elena Skribnik (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages, 868–878. 1st edn. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767664.003.0043.

Contact person: Pärtel Lippus partel.lippus@ut.ee