The Phonetic Structure of Kapampangan

Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) 2025 No. 2
11 March | Tuesday | 4:00 PM
CSSP Health and Wellness Center

The Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) features talks by invited experts on various topics under the fields of theoretical and applied linguistics. For this second installment, Dr. Seunghun J. Lee, head of the Department of Psychology and Linguistics at the International Christian University (ICU), will give a talk on the phonetic structure of Kapampangan.

ABSTRACT

This talk offers an overview of the phonetic structure of Kapampangan, an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines. A vocabulary list was published in Bergano (1860) and a grammar in Bergano (1916). Since Bergano’s seminal work, a series of work on Kapampangan (Catrillo 1955, Forman 1971, Mirikitani 1971, 1972, Kitano 2018) mainly focused on the morphosyntax of the language. This talk complements these previous work by analyzing the phonetics of segments using acoustic data. A focus is given to the voicing and place contrast in plosives and nasals. The talk will also discuss phonetics of fricative(s) and other sonorants.

BIONOTE

Dr. Seunghun Lee is a Senior Associate Professor of Linguistics and is currently the Head of the Department of Psychology and Linguistics at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo Japan. He previously served as director of the Institute for Educational Research and Service at ICU. After receiving his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2009 he worked in the TESOL program at Central Connecticut State University before coming to Tokyo in 2015. His research interests combine the documentation of lesser-studied languages in Africa and Asia with linguistic theory.

This face-to-face event is free and open to the public.