Time: Wednesday, May 7, 2025 @ 11:30
Venue: Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, Grunwaldzka 6
Speaker: Prof. James Kirby (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich)
The role of the voice in language structure
Abstract
When we talk about a voice as being “creaky” or “breathy,” we might be referring specifically to phonation, a sound-generating process of the larynx, or more generally to voice quality, a broader concept which subsumes phonation type, but also other characteristics of the vocal tract affecting the overall sound of a voice. While acoustic difference in voice quality are often deployed for paralinguistic and sociolinguistic purposes, they are also used to signal phonological contrasts. In this talk, I introduce some of the ways in which voice quality is used contrastively in the world’s languages. I give special attention to voice register, a type of phonological contrast common in languages of Africa and Southeast Asia, characterised by correlated phonetic properties associated with phonation type, vowel quality, and pitch. Register systems are of particular importance for voice studies, because they highlight how voice quality is not simply a matter of phonatory settings, but is rather a function of inherent interdependencies between physiological states of the vocal tract. In addition to introducing some examples of register systems, I will briefly describe how the acoustic correlates of register can be measured, as well as how their relative perceptual importance can be assessed..
About the speaker
Prof. James Kirby is a linguist and speech scientist specialising in the phonetics of tone, register, and voice quality. Prof. Kirby received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2010, after which he held a position at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, he moved to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich to take up the Bavarian AI Chair in Spoken Language Processing at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing. He was the recipient of an AHRC Early Career Fellowship to study tonal text-setting, and together with Marc Brunelle, an AHRC Research Grant to investigate the evolution of register in Southeast Asia, and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded EVOTONE project, studying the emergence and evolution of linguistic tone.
About the lecture series
WA Distinguished Professors’ Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students.