Annie Rialland - Biography#

Annie Rialland is Director of Research emerita at the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology of the CNRS (Paris). She has been at this institution throughout her career, co-directing it with Jacqueline Vaissière for 15 years. Her characteristic approach at the LPP was to combine phonetic and phonological perspectives (autosegmental phonology, in particular).

Her main domains of expertise are phonetics, phonology, prosody, and African languages. She defended her doctoral thesis in Paris in 1978 and her habilitation in Nice in 1988, beginning her involvement with African languages, with special consideration of the Gur, Mandé, Atlantic, and Bantu families. Outside Africa, she contributed on French and pioneered the serious linguistic study of whistled speech, in particular Silbo of La Gomera.

Her numerous articles appeared in leading journals (Phonology, Lingua, Linguistics, Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris) and in books from major publishers.

Annie Rialland supervised doctoral theses on phonetics and phonology of a diversity of languages (Berber, Bantu languages, Japanese, among others).

Among the numerous international collaborative projects she was involved in, she co-directed a French-German project, BANTUPSYN, devoted to the phonology/syntax Interface in Bantu (2009-12), and was a co-pilot of DIAREF, a project on child language acquisition (2010-13).

In 2016, Annie Rialland served as President of the Société de Linguistique de Paris.