In 1978 Rialland defended her doctoral thesis, “Une langue à tons en terrasses, le gulmancema" at the University of Paris 5.[2] In 1988 she defended her thèse d’état,[3] “Systèmes prosodiques africains ou fondements empiriques pour un modèle multilinéaire,"[4] at the University of Nice.
From the beginning, her scientific approach combined phonetic and phonological perspectives (autosegmental phonology, in particular). Over the years, her work investigated a broad range of languages, mainly African (from various language families: Gur, Mandé, Atlantic, Bantu), but also French and the whistled language of La Gomera. She has also supervised doctoral theses on the phonetics and phonology of a diverse range of languages (Berber, Bantu languages, Japanese, among others).[5]
Career at the LPP
With Jacqueline Vaissière, Rialland co-directed the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP) in Paris for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006.[6] Under their direction, the research orientation of the LPP turned towards integrating phonology and phonetics, based on experimental methods.
While at the LPP, Rialland was involved in a number of international collaborative projects funded by leading funding agencies. She co-directed, with Laura J. Downing, a French-German ANR-DFG project, BANTUPSYN, devoted to the Phonology-syntax Interface in Bantu languages (2009–2012).[7] Rialland was one of the co-pilots of DIAREF, a project on child language acquisition (2010–2013).[8] From 2015 to 2018 Rialland was a member of the French-German ANR-DFG project, BULB, which aims to apply cutting edge speech technologies to help document and analyze unwritten languages (2015–2018).[9]
She was married to G. Nick Clements, an American theoretical phonologist; they are the parents of two children, William R. Clements and Celia A. Clements.[12]
Selected publications
Clech-Darbon, Anne; Rebuschi, Georges; Rialland, Annie (1999). "Are There Cleft Sentences in French?". The Grammar of Focus. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Vol. 24. p. 83. doi:10.1075/la.24.04cle. ISBN978-90-272-2745-4.
Clements, G., & Rialland, A. (2007). Africa as a phonological area. In B. Heine & D. Nurse (Eds.), A Linguistic Geography of Africa (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, pp. 36-85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486272.004
Rialland, Annie (2007). "Question prosody: An African perspective". Tones and Tunes: Typological Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody. Phonology and Phonetics. Vol. 1. pp. 35–62. doi:10.1515/9783110207569.35. ISBN978-3-11-019057-1.
