Sam Hellmuth
Lecturer
sh581@york.ac.uk
+44 (0)1904 432657
Personal webpage: http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~sh581/
Research
I work on the intonation of spoken Arabic dialects, with most of my work so far on Egyptian Arabic. I am interested in i) establishing the empirical facts (the intonational systems of many spoken Arabic dialects are not yet described) so as to determine the nature and degree of prosodic variation across Arabic dialects, and ii) pursuing the theoretical implications of the observed variation in the context of a general cross-linguistic typology of prosodic variation. I work within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework of intonation, and currently model prosodic variation within Optimality Theory.
I am particularly interested in identifying languages which have word-level postlexical accent (as opposed to languages which have word-level lexical accent, e.g. Swedish) hence recent work on the Australian language Mawng.
Selected Publications
- Hellmuth, S. 2007. The relationship between prosodic structure and pitch accent distribution: evidence from Egyptian Arabic. The Linguistic Review. 24, 2: 289-314.
- Hellmuth, S. 2007. The foot as the domain of tonal alignment of intonational pitch accents. Proceedings of 16th ICPhS, Germany.
- Hellmuth, S. & D. El Zarka. 2007. Variation in phonetic realization or in phonological categories? Intonational pitch accents in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and Egyptian Formal Arabic. Proceedings of 16th ICPhS, Germany, Special Session Arabic Phonetics at the Beginning of the 2nd Millenium.
- Hellmuth, S., F.Kügler & R. Singer. to appear. Intonation
in Mawng. Online proceedings of 16th ICPhS satellite workshop Intonational
Phonology: Understudied or Fieldwork Languages.
Hellmuth, S. to appear. Prosodic weight and phonological phrasing in Cairene Arabic. Proceedings of Annual Meeting of Chicago Linguistic Society 40. - Hellmuth, S. 2006. Focus-related pitch range manipulation (and peak alignment effects) in Egyptian Arabic. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden.
- Skopeteas, S., I. Fiedler, S. Hellmuth, A. Schwarz, R. Stoel, G. Fanselow, C. Fþry, & M. Krifka (2006) Questionnaire on Information Structure (QUIS). Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure Volume 4. Universitÿtsverlag: Universitÿt Potsdam.
- Hellmuth, S. 2005. No De-accenting in (or of) Phrases: Evidence from Arabic for cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal prosodic variation. In, Frota, Sonia, Vigario, Marina, and Freitas, M. J. (eds.) Prosodies, pp.99-112: Mouton de Gruyter.