phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

I installed Windows 7 (RS) a couple of weeks ago and noticed that Microsoft’s default fonts for body text and headings –Calibri and Cambria, respectively– have been upgraded to include phonetic symbols and allow diacritic stacking. As far as I can tell, they’re now as IPA-friendly as Times New Roman (cf. earlier post) and perhaps better: in Powerpoint, where Calibri is the default, both superscripts and subscripts finally stack nicely (unlike with Times New Roman).

Introductory Phonology

Bruce Hayes

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

Accessible, succinct, and including numerous student-friendly features, this introductory textbook offers an exceptional foundation to the field for those who are coming to it for the first time.

• Provides an ideal first course book in phonology, written by a renowned phonologist
• Developed and tested in the classroom through years of experience and use
• Emphasizes analysis of phonological data, placing this in its scientific context, and explains the relevant methodology
• Guides students through the larger questions of what phonological patterns reveal about language
• Includes numerous course-friendly features, including multi-part exercises and annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Introduction to Natural Phonology

July 6-10, 2009
Porto, Portugal
João Veloso

This course will be an introduction to the main ideas of Natural Phonology, a theory first proposed by David Stampe (1969, 1979), and later developed by Stampe and Donegan (1978, 1979, 1983, 2004) and Donegan (1993, 1995, 1996, etc.). Reference will be made, whenever appropriate, to other followers of the theory, like Churma, Dressler, Dziubalska, Hurch, Nathan, Rhodes, and Wojcik.

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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Tones and Features: A Symposium in Honor of G. Nick Clements

June 18-19, 2009
Paris, France

A symposium will be held to honor the many contributions of Nick Clements to the field of linguistics.

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Unlike phonoloblog, the LINGUIST List has a staff of students who require funding to keep list going. Please consider contributing a little something during their current fund drive. The message from Anthony Aristar copied below clarifies. Since this message was sent out a few days ago, the fund drive has gotten around $20,000 closer to their goal of $60,000. But more is still needed!

Here’s the quick link to donate:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Dear Listowners:

As you know, the LINGUIST List provides you with Listserv facilities without any charge. We do this because we feel that it is important that there be no barriers to the free interchange of information between those interested in language and linguistics, and we know that many of you have no access to good Listserv software, or to any place to archive their postings. We’re genuinely happy to help with this.

However, as you also probably know, running the LINGUIST site, with its servers and expensive software — four Unix servers, five Oracle databases, Coldfusion server, Listserv, map server and Java and PHP servers — is not cheap. The only way we can provide these services free is to do what we do now, and have an annual fund drive.

This has been a bad year for everyone and everything… And our fund drive is no exception. We are only halfway to our goal of $60,000, and the fund drive has been running for almost three weeks. Frankly, we are getting worried… So we’re writing this message to ask if you would be generous enough to send a call to your members — if you haven’t done this already — asking them to contribute to our drive, so that the services we have been providing, for free, we can continue to provide… for free.

You know that we send you messages like this very rarely. We don’t want to bother you. And we’d like to emphasize that there is no obligation on your part to do as we are asking. This is entirely voluntary.

But if you would be willing to help us, and ask your list-members to contribute, we’d be very grateful. Our donation page is:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Thank you very much!

Anthony Aristar
Moderator, LINGUIST

I’m pretty sure that the readership of this blog (all 2 of you) is a proper subset of the readership of Language Log, but just in case you were absent one of these two days, my UCSD emeritus colleague Yuki Kuroda passed away late last month. I’ve since spent a little time (with several other folks in my department) working on a website for Yuki, with his obituary, a comprehensive bibliography, many remembrances, and more.

And I’ve also spent time thinking about Yuki’s classic 1967 contribution to phonological theory, Yawelmani Phonology. (Click the link — it’s a new $20 MIT Press Classics Series edition.) The Yawelmani variety of Yokuts is now more commonly/correctly referred to as Yowulmne; since neither name can be found in the Ethnologue, I will henceforth refer to it as Yokuts. (Plus, I think that looks and sounds cooler next to Yuki’s name in the title of this post.)

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Melody vs. structure in phonological representations

Session at the 40th Poznan Linguistic Meeting. 2-5 September. Gniezno, Poland.

Traditionally, melodic primitives are linked with structural positions, with the implication that melody specifies phonetic properties such as voicing or place of articulation, whereas the structural positions themselves are devoid of phonetic content. This distinction between melody and structure appears to be widely accepted, even among ‘phonetically based’ approaches to phonology. For example, Steriade (1997) presents a cue-based account of laryngeal neutralizations in various languages, which is presented largely as a refutation of a ‘licensing by prosody’ (e.g. Ito 1986) approach that relates the presence or absence of laryngeal contrasts to questions of syllable structure. Recent proposals in element theory (Jensen 1994, Pochtrager 2006) replace melodic properties with structural configurations, but nevertheless assume that melody and structure are different representational species.

This session seeks to examine the underlying assumption of a melody/structure dichotomy. We are particularly interested in the following questions. Are ‘licensing by cue’ and ‘licensing by prosody’ mutually exclusive. Can we really separate melody and structure? If not, how do melody and structure interact? Is structure really phonetically bare? If not, what defines it?

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I’ve made it no secret here that Kenstowicz & Kisseberth (1979) is my favorite phonology textbook of all time, and I would even go so far as to say that Chuck Kisseberth is my favorite phonologist of all time. That’s why I was very pleased to see this LINGUIST List announcement today, the title of which rather understatedly offers the table of contents for Language Sciences, Vol. 31, Nos. 2&3 (2009), a special issue edited by Kenstowicz in honor of Kisseberth. Here’s the editor’s preface:

Charles (Chuck) Kisseberth occupies a unique position in phonology (comparable to the late Ken Hale’s in syntax). He has conducted trailblazing research at both the theoretical and descriptive levels, treating the two as different aspects of the same grand enterprise. His many papers and books over his 40 year career are commonly regarded as masterpieces of phonological analysis with mountains of data to support each step of the argument. Many of the most intriguing data sets that have continued to occupy our field’s attention were either originally discovered by or brought to our general attention by Chuck: Yawelmani vowels and syllable structure, Klamath global rules, Tonkawa derivational constraints, Chimwini sentential phonology, Bantu migrating tones. His early work on rule ordering, conspiracies, and derivational constraints diagnosed serious problems with the strictly bottom-up, derivational model of classical generative phonology. This fundamental insight was given its proper due only some 25 years later with the development of Optimality Theory. Chuck has been an active contributor to the OT literature with his Optimal Domains model of autosegmental phonology (in collaboration with Jennifer Cole and Farida Cassimjee). Chuck has been equally successful as a teacher and mentor. He has directed over forty doctoral dissertations — many by native speaker linguists describing their languages for the first time. Our 1979 textbook Generative Phonology: Description and Theory was the table at which a whole generation of linguists were served their first taste of phonology. We hope that the studies presented here provide him some recompense for his inspiration, guidance, and friendship over the years.

The TOC is below the fold; if you have access, check out the issue itself here.

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Seminar: Approaches to word accent (word stress)

Organized by Rob Goedemans, Jeroen van de Weijer and Marc van Oostendorp (Leiden University)

April 2, 2009; Leiden University, Lipsius Building (http://www.visitors.leiden.edu/lipsius.jsp), room 235c

14.00 - 16:00 Harry van der Hulst (University of Connecticut): A new theory of word accentual structures (abstract below)
16:00 - Comments by Marc van Oostendorp and Jeroen van de Weijer, followed by discussion

Participation in this seminar is free for all. If possible, please announce your intention to come with Marc.van.Oostendorp@Meertens.KNAW.nl

A New Theory of Word Accentual Structures
Harry van der Hulst
University of Connecticut

The key insight of standard metrical theory (Liberman and Prince 1977, Vergnaud and Halle 1978, Hayes 1980, Halle and Vergnaud 1987, Idsardi 1990) is that syllables (or perhaps subsyllabic constituents such as skeletal positions, rhymes or moras) of words are organized into a layer of foot structure, each foot having a head. Primary accent is then derived by organizing the feet into a word structure in which one foot is the head. The head of the head foot, being a head at both levels, expresses primary accent. In this view, rhythmic accents are assigned first, while primary accent is regarded as the promotion of one of these rhythmic accents. In this seminar, I defend a different
formal theory of word accent. The theory is non-metrical in that the account of primary accent location is not based on iterative foot structure. The theory separates the representation of primary and rhythmic accents, the idea being that the latter are accounted for with reference to the primary accent location. This means that rhythmic structure is either assigned later (in a derivational sense),
or governed by constraints that are subordinate to the constraints that govern primary accent (as is possible in the approach presented in Prince and Smolensky 1993). The present approach has been called ‘a primary-accent first theory’ (see van der Hulst 1984, 1990, 1992, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000a, 2002, 2009, van der Hulst and Kooij 1994, van der Hulst and Lahiri 1988 for earlier statements; see web page below for these and other references). I will demonstrate the workings of the theory using a variety of examples from bounded and unbounded (weight-sensitive and insensitive systems) taken from the StressTyp database developed by Rob Goedemans and Van der Hulst (http://stresstyp-test.leidenuniv.nl/).

The latest (online) issue (Vol. 25, Iss. 3) has recently been announced.

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