Methods in prosody: A Romance language perspective

Ingo Feldhausen is a postdoctoral lecturer in the Romance Department of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Germany). He obtained his habilitation (postdoctoral dissertation) in 2015 with a thesis on the intonation of left-dislocations in Spanish. He had previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP – Paris 3) and the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (LFF – Paris 7) in Paris (France). In 2008, he defended his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Potsdam (Germany) and published it as Sentential Form and Prosodic Structure of Catalan (2010) with John Benjamins Publishing. His research focuses on the prosody-syntax interface and the intonational phonology of Romance languages as well as on language variation and multilingualism by combining empirical/experimental research and theoretical explanation.

Jan Fliessbach is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Romance Philology at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). He works on intonation and epistemic modality in Spanish, using both corpus and experimental data. His interests include pragmatics, syntax, language variation, and sociolinguistics. His current research focuses on the interaction of prosody and discourse particles. He studied at Freie Universität Berlin and Université de Montréal (Canada).

Maria del Mar Vanrell is an assistant professor at the Departament de Filologia Catalana i Lingüística General of the Universitat de les Illes Balears. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree at the Universitat de les Illes Balears in 2003, Vanrell worked for two years as an associate lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2011 she defended her PhD dissertation, “The phonological relevance of tonal scaling in the intonational grammar of Catalan”, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher/instructor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on the intonational phonology of Romance languages, prosody–pragmatics and prosody–syntax interfaces, the early acquisition of those interfaces, and methodological issues concerning ecological validity in data elicitation.