Marzena Żygis
Biographic Data
| ID | 103440 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marzena Żygis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marzena |
| FAMILY NAME | Żygis |
| SIGNATURE | ŻYGIS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2596-9171 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Facial expressions in different communication settings: A case of whispering and speaking with a face mask in Farsi
This study addresses the importance of orofacial gestures and acoustic cues to execute prosodic patterns under different communicative settings in Farsi. Given that Farsi lacks morpho-syntactic markers for polar questions, we aim to determine whether specific facial movements accompany the prosodic correlates of questionhood in Farsi under conditions of degraded information, that is, whispering and wearing face masks. We hypothesise speakers will…
Articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflexes compared with plain ones
The present paper investigates articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflex sibilants compared with their plain counterparts. It tests the hypothesis advanced by Hamann (2003: 44) that palatalised retroflexes are non-existent and that retroflexes in Polish change to palato-alveolars [ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ] when being palatalised. Based on articulatory data from 20 speakers we provide evidence that at least part of the data (53.5%) ar…
Do children better understand adults or themselves? An acoustic and perceptual study of the complex sibilant system of Polish
This paper reports a developmental production-perception study of the three-way Polish sibilant contrast /s, ʂ, ɕ/ in typically developing children (N = 76). Children aged 2;11–7;11 produced words with sibilants in word-medial and initial position. They then identified the same words they produced, and the words as produced by an unknown adult female. Results show higher identification accuracy for adult productions across all ages. Production an…
Certainly but not certain: The expression of subjective and objective probability
This paper investigates the interpretation of the epistemic modal adjectives possible, certain and their adverbial counterparts possibly, certainly, taking the perspective that the former express objective modality, whereas the latter express subjective modality. In support of this view, we report on two experiments that assess speakers’ acceptance of possible, certain, possibly, certainly in different contexts. Our results extend those of Lassit…
Prosodic Transfer in Contact Varieties: Vocative Calls in Metropolitan and Basaá-Cameroonian French
This paper examines the production of vocative calls in (Northern) Metropolitan French (MF) and Cameroonian French (CF) as it is spoken by native speakers of a tone language, Basaá. While the results of our Discourse Completion Task confirm previous descriptions of MF, they also further our understanding of the relationship between pragmatics and prosody across different groups of French speakers. MF favors the vocative chant in routine contexts …
Phonological contrasts and gradient effects in ongoing lenition in the Spanish of Gran Canaria
This study explores ongoing lenition of postvocalic /p t k b d g/ in the Spanish of Gran Canaria. Duration, intensity and harmonics-to-noise ratio of 16,454 sounds produced by 44 native speakers were measured, with the latter phonetic parameter used for the first time to investigate lenition. The results show a path of gradual sound shortening and opening from voiceless stops to open approximants, as well as systematic use of six different varian…
Acoustic Correlates of Focus Marking in Czech and Polish
Languages vary in the type of contexts that affect prosodic prominence. This paper reports on a production study investigating how different types of foci influence prosody in Polish and Czech noun phrases. The results show that in both languages, focus and givenness are marked prosodically, with pitch and intensity as the main acoustic correlates. Like Germanic languages, Polish and Czech patterns show prosodic focus marking in a broad range of …
Phonetics and phonology of soft ‘g’ in Turkish
The present study aims to approach soft ‘g’, a highly disputable sound in Turkish phonetics and phonology, from a multidimensional perspective by (i) analysing its historical development, (ii) investigating its distribution in a dictionary of Modern Turkish, and (iii) studying its acoustic realization. In the Ottoman script soft ‘g’ was represented with two letters: , pronounced [ɣ], was used in the context of preceding back vowels V back _(V bac…
Segmental cues to intonation of statements and polar questions in whispered, semi-whispered and normal speech modes
Ukrainian
About 35 million people around the world speak Ukrainian (Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016). The largest populations of Ukrainian speakers outside Ukraine (more than 32 million speakers) are in Russia (c. 4.5 million), followed by Moldova (c. 0.6 million), Canada (c. 0.5 million) and the USA (c. 0.5 million). Smaller Ukrainian communities have also settled in some other countries including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Argentina, Brazil and S…
Glottale Markierungen vokalinitialer Wörter: Deutsch und Polnisch im Kontrast
Anhand einer Auswahl historischer Reden je dreier prominenter Deutscher und Polen wird eine signalphonetisch gestützte sprachvergleichende Analyse der glottalen Markierung vokalinitialer Wörter durchgeführt. Generell erweist sich die glottale Markierung als variabel entlang eines Kontinuums zwischen einem echten glottalen Verschlusslaut (harter Stimmeinsatz) des Initialvokals über zeitlich nicht exakt koordinierte Glottalisierungen (Knarrstimme) …
Phonetic and lexical gradience in Polish prefixed words
The article focuses on the gradient phonetic effects occurring at the prefix-stem boundary in Polish and their phonological interpretation. The environment of a consonant-final prefix followed by a vowel-initial stem exhibits remarkable variation as to the presence of specific phonetic cues, ranging from their being completely absent or very weak to the presence of strong ones, such as the occurrence of a glottal stop combined with partial devoic…
(Non-)retroflex Slavic affricates and their motivation: Evidence from Czech and Polish
The Slavic affricate represented by /č/ is tacitly or explicitly assumed to be // for all Slavic languages. In this paper we revise the affricate inventories of Polish and Czech, showing that the symbol /č/ stands for two different sounds: the palatoalveolar // in Czech and the retroflex // in Polish. This conclusion is supported by acoustic results for Polish and Czech data. The fact that COG (centre of gravity) values of frication are not signi…
Typology of consonantal insertions
The present study, based on a typological survey of ca. 70 languages, offers a systematization of consonantal insertions by classifying them into three main types: grammatical, phonetic, and prosodic insertions. The three epenthesis types essentially differ from each other in terms of preferred sounds, domains of application, the role of segmental context, their occurrence cross-linguistically, the extent of variation and phonetic explication. Th…
Glottal marking of vowel-initial words in German
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary…
A perceptual study of Polish fricatives, and its implications for historical sound change
On the avoidance of voiced sibilant affricates
In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and frication are responsible for the avoidance of voiced affrica…
Papers in phonetics and phonology
ZASPiL 49.2008 contains 9 articles
The phonetic motivation for phonological stop assibilation
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [t∫] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2006) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by by /j/, and (b) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of two acoustic experiments…
(Non)retroflexivity of Slavic affricates and its motivation: Evidence from Polish and Czech
The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it revises the common assumption that the affricate denotes /t͡ʃ/ for all Slavic languages. On the basis of experimental results it is shown that Slavic stands for two sounds: /t͡ʃ/ as e.g. in Czech and /ʈʂ/ as in Polish. The second goal of the paper is to show that this difference is not accidental but it is motivated by perceptual relations among sibilants. In Polish, /t͡ʃ/ changed to /ʈʂ/ thus lowerin…
Phonetic Motivation for Phonological Stop Assibilation
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments …
(Un)markedness of trills: The case of Slavic r-palatalisation
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [r]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) ph…
Evolution of sibilants in Polish and Russian
In this paper we provide an account of the historical development of Polish and Russian sibilants. The arguments provided here are of theoretical interest because they show that (i) certain allophonic rules are driven by the need to keep contrasts perceptually distinct, (ii) (unconditioned) sound changes result from needs of perceptual distinctiveness, and (iii) perceptual distinctiveness can be extended to a class of consonants, i.e. the sibilan…
Phonetic and phonological aspects of Slavic sibilant fricatives
In this artiele I reanalyze sibilant inventories of Slavic languages by taking into consideration acoustic. perceptive and phonological evidence. The main goal of this study is to show that perception is an important factor which determines the shape of sibilant inventories. The improvement of perceptual contrast essentially contributes to creating new sibilant inventories by (i) changing the place of articulation of the existing phonemes (ii) me…
(Non-)retroflex Slavic affricates and their motivation: Evidence from Czech and Polish
The Slavic affricate represented by /č/ is tacitly or explicitly assumed to be // for all Slavic languages. In this paper we revise the affricate inventories of Polish and Czech, showing that the symbol /č/ stands for two different sounds: the palatoalveolar // in Czech and the retroflex // in Polish. This conclusion is supported by acoustic results for Polish and Czech data. The fact that COG (centre of gravity) values of frication are not signi…
A perceptual study of Polish fricatives, and its implications for historical sound change
The phonetic motivation for phonological stop assibilation
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [t∫] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2006) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by by /j/, and (b) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of two acoustic experiments…
Articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflexes compared with plain ones
The present paper investigates articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflex sibilants compared with their plain counterparts. It tests the hypothesis advanced by Hamann (2003: 44) that palatalised retroflexes are non-existent and that retroflexes in Polish change to palato-alveolars [ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ] when being palatalised. Based on articulatory data from 20 speakers we provide evidence that at least part of the data (53.5%) ar…
Segmental cues to intonation of statements and polar questions in whispered, semi-whispered and normal speech modes
Ukrainian
About 35 million people around the world speak Ukrainian (Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016). The largest populations of Ukrainian speakers outside Ukraine (more than 32 million speakers) are in Russia (c. 4.5 million), followed by Moldova (c. 0.6 million), Canada (c. 0.5 million) and the USA (c. 0.5 million). Smaller Ukrainian communities have also settled in some other countries including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Argentina, Brazil and S…
Do children better understand adults or themselves? An acoustic and perceptual study of the complex sibilant system of Polish
This paper reports a developmental production-perception study of the three-way Polish sibilant contrast /s, ʂ, ɕ/ in typically developing children (N = 76). Children aged 2;11–7;11 produced words with sibilants in word-medial and initial position. They then identified the same words they produced, and the words as produced by an unknown adult female. Results show higher identification accuracy for adult productions across all ages. Production an…
Prosodic Transfer in Contact Varieties: Vocative Calls in Metropolitan and Basaá-Cameroonian French
This paper examines the production of vocative calls in (Northern) Metropolitan French (MF) and Cameroonian French (CF) as it is spoken by native speakers of a tone language, Basaá. While the results of our Discourse Completion Task confirm previous descriptions of MF, they also further our understanding of the relationship between pragmatics and prosody across different groups of French speakers. MF favors the vocative chant in routine contexts …
Phonetics and phonology of soft ‘g’ in Turkish
The present study aims to approach soft ‘g’, a highly disputable sound in Turkish phonetics and phonology, from a multidimensional perspective by (i) analysing its historical development, (ii) investigating its distribution in a dictionary of Modern Turkish, and (iii) studying its acoustic realization. In the Ottoman script soft ‘g’ was represented with two letters: , pronounced [ɣ], was used in the context of preceding back vowels V back _(V bac…
Phonetic and lexical gradience in Polish prefixed words
The article focuses on the gradient phonetic effects occurring at the prefix-stem boundary in Polish and their phonological interpretation. The environment of a consonant-final prefix followed by a vowel-initial stem exhibits remarkable variation as to the presence of specific phonetic cues, ranging from their being completely absent or very weak to the presence of strong ones, such as the occurrence of a glottal stop combined with partial devoic…
Evolution of sibilants in Polish and Russian
In this paper we provide an account of the historical development of Polish and Russian sibilants. The arguments provided here are of theoretical interest because they show that (i) certain allophonic rules are driven by the need to keep contrasts perceptually distinct, (ii) (unconditioned) sound changes result from needs of perceptual distinctiveness, and (iii) perceptual distinctiveness can be extended to a class of consonants, i.e. the sibilan…
Phonetic and phonological aspects of Slavic sibilant fricatives
In this artiele I reanalyze sibilant inventories of Slavic languages by taking into consideration acoustic. perceptive and phonological evidence. The main goal of this study is to show that perception is an important factor which determines the shape of sibilant inventories. The improvement of perceptual contrast essentially contributes to creating new sibilant inventories by (i) changing the place of articulation of the existing phonemes (ii) me…
Phonetic Motivation for Phonological Stop Assibilation
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments …
(Un)markedness of trills: The case of Slavic r-palatalisation
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [r]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) ph…
(Non)retroflexivity of Slavic affricates and its motivation: Evidence from Polish and Czech
The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it revises the common assumption that the affricate denotes /t͡ʃ/ for all Slavic languages. On the basis of experimental results it is shown that Slavic stands for two sounds: /t͡ʃ/ as e.g. in Czech and /ʈʂ/ as in Polish. The second goal of the paper is to show that this difference is not accidental but it is motivated by perceptual relations among sibilants. In Polish, /t͡ʃ/ changed to /ʈʂ/ thus lowerin…
The phonetic motivation for phonological stop assibilation
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [t∫] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2006) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by by /j/, and (b) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of two acoustic experiments…
On the avoidance of voiced sibilant affricates
In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and frication are responsible for the avoidance of voiced affrica…
Papers in phonetics and phonology
ZASPiL 49.2008 contains 9 articles
Typology of consonantal insertions
The present study, based on a typological survey of ca. 70 languages, offers a systematization of consonantal insertions by classifying them into three main types: grammatical, phonetic, and prosodic insertions. The three epenthesis types essentially differ from each other in terms of preferred sounds, domains of application, the role of segmental context, their occurrence cross-linguistically, the extent of variation and phonetic explication. Th…
Glottal marking of vowel-initial words in German
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary…
A perceptual study of Polish fricatives, and its implications for historical sound change
Glottale Markierungen vokalinitialer Wörter: Deutsch und Polnisch im Kontrast
Anhand einer Auswahl historischer Reden je dreier prominenter Deutscher und Polen wird eine signalphonetisch gestützte sprachvergleichende Analyse der glottalen Markierung vokalinitialer Wörter durchgeführt. Generell erweist sich die glottale Markierung als variabel entlang eines Kontinuums zwischen einem echten glottalen Verschlusslaut (harter Stimmeinsatz) des Initialvokals über zeitlich nicht exakt koordinierte Glottalisierungen (Knarrstimme) …
Phonetic and lexical gradience in Polish prefixed words
The article focuses on the gradient phonetic effects occurring at the prefix-stem boundary in Polish and their phonological interpretation. The environment of a consonant-final prefix followed by a vowel-initial stem exhibits remarkable variation as to the presence of specific phonetic cues, ranging from their being completely absent or very weak to the presence of strong ones, such as the occurrence of a glottal stop combined with partial devoic…
(Non-)retroflex Slavic affricates and their motivation: Evidence from Czech and Polish
The Slavic affricate represented by /č/ is tacitly or explicitly assumed to be // for all Slavic languages. In this paper we revise the affricate inventories of Polish and Czech, showing that the symbol /č/ stands for two different sounds: the palatoalveolar // in Czech and the retroflex // in Polish. This conclusion is supported by acoustic results for Polish and Czech data. The fact that COG (centre of gravity) values of frication are not signi…
Phonetics and phonology of soft ‘g’ in Turkish
The present study aims to approach soft ‘g’, a highly disputable sound in Turkish phonetics and phonology, from a multidimensional perspective by (i) analysing its historical development, (ii) investigating its distribution in a dictionary of Modern Turkish, and (iii) studying its acoustic realization. In the Ottoman script soft ‘g’ was represented with two letters: , pronounced [ɣ], was used in the context of preceding back vowels V back _(V bac…
Segmental cues to intonation of statements and polar questions in whispered, semi-whispered and normal speech modes
Ukrainian
About 35 million people around the world speak Ukrainian (Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016). The largest populations of Ukrainian speakers outside Ukraine (more than 32 million speakers) are in Russia (c. 4.5 million), followed by Moldova (c. 0.6 million), Canada (c. 0.5 million) and the USA (c. 0.5 million). Smaller Ukrainian communities have also settled in some other countries including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Argentina, Brazil and S…
Acoustic Correlates of Focus Marking in Czech and Polish
Languages vary in the type of contexts that affect prosodic prominence. This paper reports on a production study investigating how different types of foci influence prosody in Polish and Czech noun phrases. The results show that in both languages, focus and givenness are marked prosodically, with pitch and intensity as the main acoustic correlates. Like Germanic languages, Polish and Czech patterns show prosodic focus marking in a broad range of …
Phonological contrasts and gradient effects in ongoing lenition in the Spanish of Gran Canaria
This study explores ongoing lenition of postvocalic /p t k b d g/ in the Spanish of Gran Canaria. Duration, intensity and harmonics-to-noise ratio of 16,454 sounds produced by 44 native speakers were measured, with the latter phonetic parameter used for the first time to investigate lenition. The results show a path of gradual sound shortening and opening from voiceless stops to open approximants, as well as systematic use of six different varian…
Certainly but not certain: The expression of subjective and objective probability
This paper investigates the interpretation of the epistemic modal adjectives possible, certain and their adverbial counterparts possibly, certainly, taking the perspective that the former express objective modality, whereas the latter express subjective modality. In support of this view, we report on two experiments that assess speakers’ acceptance of possible, certain, possibly, certainly in different contexts. Our results extend those of Lassit…
Prosodic Transfer in Contact Varieties: Vocative Calls in Metropolitan and Basaá-Cameroonian French
This paper examines the production of vocative calls in (Northern) Metropolitan French (MF) and Cameroonian French (CF) as it is spoken by native speakers of a tone language, Basaá. While the results of our Discourse Completion Task confirm previous descriptions of MF, they also further our understanding of the relationship between pragmatics and prosody across different groups of French speakers. MF favors the vocative chant in routine contexts …
Articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflexes compared with plain ones
The present paper investigates articulatory and acoustic variation in Polish palatalised retroflex sibilants compared with their plain counterparts. It tests the hypothesis advanced by Hamann (2003: 44) that palatalised retroflexes are non-existent and that retroflexes in Polish change to palato-alveolars [ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ] when being palatalised. Based on articulatory data from 20 speakers we provide evidence that at least part of the data (53.5%) ar…
Do children better understand adults or themselves? An acoustic and perceptual study of the complex sibilant system of Polish
This paper reports a developmental production-perception study of the three-way Polish sibilant contrast /s, ʂ, ɕ/ in typically developing children (N = 76). Children aged 2;11–7;11 produced words with sibilants in word-medial and initial position. They then identified the same words they produced, and the words as produced by an unknown adult female. Results show higher identification accuracy for adult productions across all ages. Production an…
Facial expressions in different communication settings: A case of whispering and speaking with a face mask in Farsi
This study addresses the importance of orofacial gestures and acoustic cues to execute prosodic patterns under different communicative settings in Farsi. Given that Farsi lacks morpho-syntactic markers for polar questions, we aim to determine whether specific facial movements accompany the prosodic correlates of questionhood in Farsi under conditions of degraded information, that is, whispering and wearing face masks. We hypothesise speakers will…
Linguistics (22 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (18 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Psychology (15 works) · History (13 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (8 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Speech recognition (8 works) · Vowel (8 works)