Marina Nespor

Last updated

Marina Nespor (born 3 November 1949 in Milan, Italy) is a Professor of linguistics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, [1] and senior researcher in the ERC PASCAL Project, a project investigating language acquisition and the nature of the biological endowment that allows humans to learn language. [2] Much of Dr. Nespor's research focuses on the interaction of phonology and syntax: what the prosodic structure of an utterance communicates about its grammatical structure. [1]

Nespor received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977. She was elected as member of the Academia Europaea in 2008. [3] She has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Lingua, The Linguistic Review , and Linguistics.

Select publications

The 1986 book Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is considered a classic work within its subfield. [4] It introduced an analysis of prosodic structure, including elements such as meter, syllable structure, and stress patterns, within a framework of generative grammar. [5] Using evidence from many different languages, the book investigates ways in which syntax and phonology affect one another, and how these in turn affect language perception. [6] The book was reissued in 2007 by De Gruyter as part of their Studies in Generative Grammar series. [4] [7]

L'animale parlante ("The speaking animal") by Nespor and Donna Jo Napoli (2004) [8] is an introduction to linguistics and closely related fields, aimed at readers new to the field. The book, written in Italian, introduces the standard elements of language – phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics – commonly encountered in linguistics courses. In addition, it provides an overview of language acquisition, speech and language pathology, signed languages, and language variation and change, in addition to discussing the relationship between human language and animal communication in other species. [9]

Work by Nespor and colleagues considers gestures that accompany speech part of a broad system of communication prosody. Their experiments suggest that gestures help adults understand unintelligible speech or resolve ambiguity. Based on their findings, the authors propose a general system of prosody that includes gesture as well as phonological elements of speech. [10] [11]

Related Research Articles

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

Donna Jo Napoli is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist. She currently is a professor at Swarthmore College teaching Linguistics in all different forms. She has also taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Pennsylvania.

In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.

The phonological hierarchy describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a phonological utterance, each nested within the next highest region. Different research traditions make use of slightly different hierarchies. For instance, there is one hierarchy which is primarily used in theoretical phonology, while a similar hierarchy is used in discourse analysis. Both are described in the sections below.

Government Phonology (GP) is a theoretical framework of linguistics, and more specifically of phonology. The framework aims to provide a non-arbitrary account for phonological phenomena by replacing the rule component of SPE-type phonology with well-formedness constraints on representations. Thus, it is a non-derivational representation-based framework, and as such, the current representative of Autosegmental Phonology. GP subscribes to the claim that Universal Grammar is composed of a restricted set of universal principles and parameters. As in Noam Chomsky’s principles and parameters approach to syntax, the differences in phonological systems across languages are captured through different combinations of parameter settings.

The phonological word or prosodic word is a constituent in the phonological hierarchy. It is higher than the syllable and the foot but lower than intonational phrase and the phonological phrase. It is largely held to be a prosodic domain in which phonological features within the same lexeme may spread from one morph to another, from one clitic to a clitic host, or from one clitic host to a clitic.

Mary Esther Beckman is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.

Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian, other Romance languages spoken in Italy, and Finnish. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant in certain contexts. It may also be called word-initial gemination or phonosyntactic consonantal gemination.

In linguistics, well-formedness is the quality of a clause, word, or other linguistic element that conforms to the grammar of the language of which it is a part. Well-formed words or phrases are grammatical, meaning they obey all relevant rules of grammar. In contrast, a form that violates some grammar rule is ill-formed and does not constitute part of the language.

In linguistics, a prosodic unit is a segment of speech that occurs with specific prosodic properties. These properties can be those of stress, intonation, or tonal patterns.

Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin", the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables. This feature could take on multiple values to indicate various levels of stress. Stress was assigned using the cyclic reapplication of rules to words and phrases.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

The Association for Laboratory Phonology is a non-profit professional society for researchers interested in the sound structure of language. It was founded to promote the scientific study of all aspects of phonetics and phonology of oral and sign languages through scholarly exchange across disciplines and through the use of a hybrid methodology. The founding and honorary members are Amalia Arvaniti, Mary Beckman, Cathi Best, Catherine Browman, Jennifer S. Cole, Mariapaola D'Imperio, Louis M. Goldstein, José Ignacio Hualde, Patricia Keating, John Kingston, D.R. Ladd, Peter Ladefoged, Janet Pierrehumbert, Caroline Smith, Paul Warren, and Douglas Whalen. The Association is an international body open to scholars world-wide, and currently has over 100 members.

Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology (2009–2015) and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

Prosodic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language, they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language, such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence, indicating the location of phrase boundaries, and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language, mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.

Irene B. Vogel is an American linguist, specializing in phonology. She is a professor in the University of Delaware Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department, best known for her work on the phonology-syntax interface.

Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.

References

  1. 1 2 "Marina Nespor". Language, Cognition and Development Lab. SISSA. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
  2. ↑ "PASCAL: Processing Activates Specific Constraints for Language Acquisition". SISSA Cognitive Neuroscience Sector. July 2011. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
  3. ↑ "Nespor, Marina". The Academy of Europe. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
  4. 1 2 Bakovic, Eric (December 21, 2007). "Nespor & Vogel, 1986/2007". phonoblog. Retrieved 11 March 2021.
  5. ↑ James, Allan (1988). "Review article: Marina Nespor & Irene Vogel (1986). Prosodic phonology.". Phonology. 5: 161–168. doi:10.1017/S0952675700002219. S2CID   62283269.
  6. ↑ Weinberger, Steven (1989). "Review: Prosodic Phonology". Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 11: 114–116. doi:10.1017/S0272263100007981. S2CID   145381359.
  7. ↑ Nespor, Marina; Vogel, Irene (2007). Prosodic Phonology. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN   978-3-11-019789-1.
  8. ↑ Nespor, Marina; Napoli, Donna Jo (2004). L'animale parlante: introduzione allo studio del linguaggio (in Italian). Carocci.
  9. ↑ Nespor, Stefano (26 September 2011). "L'animale parlante". Stefano Nespor (in Italian). Retrieved 11 March 2021.
  10. ↑ Hite, Emily (24 June 2014). "Talk from the hand: the role of gesture in verbal communication". Scope 10k. Stanford Medicine. Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  11. ↑ Guellaï, Bahia; Langus, Alan; Nespor, Marina (7 July 2014). "Prosody in the hands of the speaker". Frontiers in Psychology. 5: 700. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00700 . PMC   4083345 . PMID   25071666.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.