Dr Florian Breit
Research Officer in Linguistics (German)
Additional Contact Information
Position: Research Officer in Linguistics (German)
Email: f.breit@bangor.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1248 388230
Location: 37-41 College Road
Qualifications
- PhD: Linguistics
University College London, 2019 - MA: Linguistics with specialisation in Phonology
University College London, 2014 - BA: Linguistics
2012
Publications
2023
- PublishedElements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology
Breit, F. (ed.), Yoshida, Y. (ed.) & Youngberg, C. (ed.), Aug 2023, London: UCL Press.
Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review - PublishedL’ART Research Assistant
Breit, F., Tamburelli, M. & Gruffydd, I., 3 May 2023
Research output: Non-textual form › Software - PublishedMelody and segmental representation: a brief introduction
Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). UCL Press
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review - PublishedPrimitives of Phonological Structure
Breit, F. (ed.), Botma, B. (ed.), van 't Veer, M. (ed.) & van Oostendorp, M. (ed.), 9 Jun 2023, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 400 p. (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics)
Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review - PublishedPrinciples and parameters in phonology: an introduction and overview
Youngberg, C., Yoshida, Y. & Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). UCL Press
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review - PublishedProsodic structure and recursion: a brief introduction
Youngberg, C. & Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). London: UCL Press
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review - PublishedSets of (sets of) elements
Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). London: UCL Press
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review - UnpublishedThe L' ART Research Assistant: A digital toolkit for bilingualism and language attitude research
Breit, F., Tamburelli, M., Gruffydd, I. & Brasca, L., 4 May 2023, (Unpublished).
Research output: Working paper - PublishedThe structure and content of phonological primitives
van 't Veer, M., Botma, B., Breit, F. & van Oostendorp, M., 9 Jun 2023, Primitives of Phonological Structure. Breit, F., Botma, B., van 't Veer, M. & van Oostendorp, M. (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 1-36 (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
2020
- PublishedDiscussion of Scheer, T. "On the lexical character of intermodular communication"
Breit, F., 2020, In: Radical: A Journal of Phonology. 1, p. 229-239
Research output: Contribution to journal › Comment/debate
2017
- PublishedMelodic heads, saliency, and strength in voicing and nasality
Breit, F., 29 Sept 2017, In: Glossa. 2, 1, 35 p., 85.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review - UnpublishedThe Distribution of English Isograms in Google Ngrams and the British National Corpus
Breit, F., 2017, (Unpublished) In: Opticon1826. 28 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
2014
- PublishedReview of S.J. Hannahs’ (2013) The Phonology of Welsh
Breit, F. & Harris, J., 2014, In: Phonology. 31, 2, p. 338-346
Research output: Contribution to journal › Book/Film/Article review
2013
- PublishedVoice–Nasality Interaction and Headedness in Voiceless Nasals
Breit, F., 2013, University College London, p. 1, 22 p. (UCL Working Papers in Linguistics; vol. 25).
Research output: Working paper
2012
- PublishedA Survey of Young British People’s Attitudes towards learning the UK's regional languages
Breit, F., 2012, In: Début: the Undergraduate Journal of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. 3, 1, p. 59-78
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Activities
2023
- Toward a metric estimating the impact of initial consonant mutation on neutralisation and contrastivity: a Welsh case study
Paper presented at the 2023 Western Conference on Linguistics: Initial syllable faithfulness is a well-established and strong bias against alternations affecting the left edge of the word (e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939, Steriade 1994, Beckman 1998, Casali 1998, Alber 2001, Smith 2002, Barnes 2002, Becker et al. 2012). This is reflected in the disproportionally important role word onsets play in word recognition (Beckman 1998, Smith 2002). As Smith (2002) argues, such initial alternations must, if anything, improve recognisability, e.g. by increasing prominence for the parser.
11 Nov 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - Pushing boundaries in the measurement of language attitudes: Combining new technology and standardising practice
Paper presented at Linguistics Beyond and Within 2023:
Speakers’ attitudes are considered a fundamental barometer for the current and future vitality of a language, with recent work emphasising the importance of methodological developments (Kircher & Zipp, 2022). This, together with the growing concern surrounding the replicability of results across the social sciences, including in linguistics (Grieve, 2021), calls for urgent developments in research practices, including the adoption of more consistent and comparable implementations of method. In this paper, we present a series of studies conducted using a newly developed digital application for the collection, storage and transfer of data for research in multilingualism and language attitudes, specifically designed for research in bilingual populations who speak a majority language and a regional/minority/heritage language. This application offers the fundamental benefit of enhancing consistency and comparability within and across studies, which also improves reproducibility, for example by ensuring that presentation of stimuli for a speaker evaluation paradigm (Lambert et al., 1960) is more strictly controlled both across participants and across studies. As the source code is publicly available and version-controlled, other researchers can easily view and reconstruct tasks exactly as they were administered. The application was recently employed across three European communities whose regional/minority languages receive radically different degrees of socio-political recognition: Lombard (Italy), Moselle Franconian (Belgium), and Welsh (UK).Our results reveal fundamental differences in attitude scores depending on measurement type (questionnaire vs. speaker evaluation paradigm). Besides reinforcing the view that different measurements are likely to tap on different attitudinal constructs (e.g., Pantos, 2019), these results also suggest that different measurement methods may gather data on different attitude objects. We argue that this highlights a need for a more holistic approach to the measurement of language attitudes, where a battery of tests – as opposed to a single measure – should become the norm, as it has done in other research areas.
13 Oct 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - A matter of strength: Language policy, attitudes, and linguistic dominance in three bilingual communities
Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education
12 Oct 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - New developments in documenting attitudes in minority and heritage language situations: an Italian case-study
Paper presented at Documenting languages, Documenting Cultures 2023. The conference focuses on the topic of language documentation from the various perspectives offered by different ‘minority’ situations (migrant languages, minority languages, dialects). Its aim is to provide an interdisciplinary look at a topic which is today the focus of renewed interest, both in epistemological and theoretical terms.
6 Oct 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - What do you really think about Welsh?
Public outreach presentation at the Llŷn and Eifionydd National Eisteddfod 2023
12 Aug 2023
Activity: Types of Public engagement and outreach - Festival/Exhibition (Speaker) - Eastern Generative Grammar Summer School
Taught an advanced course on the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface and an Introduction to Melodic Representation.
24 Jul 2023 – 5 Aug 2023
Activity: Participation in Academic workshop, seminar, course (Invited speaker) - New avenues in collecting attitudinal data on regional/minority languages: the case of Welsh
Paper presented at the Welsh Linguistics Seminar
27 Jun 2023
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker) - Quantity in North Welsh disyllables: Between Phonology and Phonetics
Paper presented at Approaches to Phonology and Phonetics
24 Jun 2023
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
2021
- Synchronic and diachronic arguments for a trigger-centric approach to Welsh initial consonant mutation
Paper presented at the Bilbao Morpho-Phonology Circle
27 Jan 2021
Activity: Invited talk (Invited speaker)
2019
- A strictly modular perspective on Initial Consonant Mutation in Welsh
Paper presented at Séminaire P3 (Phonétique, Phonologie, Prosodie) at Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS/Université de Nantes
16 May 2019
Activity: Invited talk (Invited speaker) - Reconciling Mutation and Modularity in Welsh
Paper presented at the Atelier de phonologie, Laboratoire Sturcures Formelles du Langage, CNRS/Paris 8
15 May 2019
Activity: Invited talk (Invited speaker)
2018
- Welsh mutation for strict modularists
Paper presented at the UConn LingLunch
24 Apr 2018
Activity: Invited talk (Invited speaker)