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

Eric, thanks for setting up the phonoloblog! It’s a great way to make data available or make use of data that’s already available on the web.

To follow up on your posting about Bill Richardson’s pronunciation of the word patriota in his recent speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convetion, I went to NPR’s website and found the streaming audio broadcast. (It’s listed under the first hour on their schedule for Wed. July 28, but it’s actually part of the link to the second hour, thanks to Al Sharpton, I guess!) I’ve isolated the paragraph that he delivered in Spanish, as well as the specific phrase that contains the word of interest and, for purposes of comparison, the word crece:

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Earlier today I was listening to live coverage of the Democratic National Convention on my local public radio station. At the beginning of his speech, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico addressed his fellow Hispanic Americans with a few words in Spanish. I did a double-take when I thought I heard him pronounce the word patriota (’patriot’, though Richardson was using it attributively to describe the Hispanic American community) as [paˈtɾota] rather than [paˈtɾjota] (from underlying /patri+ot+a/). My immediate thought was that this was a typical example of Chicano Spanish hiatus resolution (Hutchinson 1974, Reyes 1976), but no — the underlying high vowel is expected to be glided before /o/ in most varieties of Spanish, including Chicano varieties. But then I remembered something about the articulation of Spanish taps.

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Thanks, Eric, for setting this up.

This is partly a test and partly a followup to Paul de Lacy’s query about data availability.

I’ve been facing a similar issue lately and think the means of addressing it depends on the medium of the data. For transcribed data, it may be pretty simple to make it available online, but not for audio or video.
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Thanks to Eric for setting up this blog.

I went to a talk at the Manchester Phonology Conference, and the speaker handed out a CD with all the data he’d elicited that related to the talk. I thought it was a great idea. Of course, putting it on the web would be even better. So:

Should it be standard practice to make the primary data that we refer to in publications publicly available?

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In a paper I’m currently working on, I propose a new analysis of the past tense and plural suffix alternations in English. I think that the analysis is interesting for a variety of reasons, but for the purposes of this post I’d like to focus on a particular prediction that the analysis makes and that I have preliminarily found to be correct (as I outline below). As far as I know, this prediction is a novel one; I hope that readers of this blog will either confirm or rectify my (mis)perception in this regard.

The prediction is that with verb stems ending in a postalveolar sibilant (e.g., mash, match, budge), the past tense suffix will also be postalveolar — i.e., it will assimilate in terms of the coronal subplace of articulation. At first I was concerned about this prediction, but after asking a few other native speakers about it I was reassured that the prediction was probably correct.

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[fǝˌnɛɾɪktɹænˈskɹɪpʃən]

If the first line of this post is not recognizable, then you probably have a browser (or a machine) that doesn’t properly display extended ASCII Unicode characters. This may be a problem for this blog, since we will probably often need to use phonetic transcription. I have very little experience with this; the html ASCII character codes for this post’s title were stolen from Geoff Pullum’s website. The page is not organized in a way that is particularly useful for phonetic transcription (nor was it meant to be), but Geoff (or someone) was kind enough to label where the nonstandard characters, the IPA characters, and the Greek, etc. characters start.

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Welcome to phonoloblog, a weblog for phonologists (and other interested linguists) to share any and all ideas relevant to phonology and phonological theory.