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Here is the programme for GLOW Phonology, March 29-31 in Geneva, Switzerland. There will be a workshop on Synchrony and Diachrony in Phonology, as well as a full day of talks in the Main Session. A few details might still change in the next few days, and a few abstracts still need to be added, but as you can see the program will be certainly worth the trip to Geneva.

During the very succesful second Old-World Conference in Phonology, last week in Troms�, Norway, it has been decided that from now on the OCP will be an annual, rather than a biannual, event. OCP3 (2006) will take place in Budapest, Hungary, and OCP4 (2007) on the island of Rhodes, Greece. Presumably the host for OCP5 (2008) will be Toulouse, France. There is now also a small website on past and future OCP’s at the University of Leiden: http://www.ocp.leidenuniv.nl/.

Sounds like a showdown to determine the World Champion of Syntax… but actually, the upcoming Superbowl provides a particularly rare collocation of team names. I’ve been playing with this post for a week now but didn’t know what to do with it, since it’s not really phonological (although that hasn’t stopped me before, nor is it technically against my reading of the rules. But while out for the morning walk I realized that a lot of the active discussion on phonoloblog starts with something one or another of us reads on Language Log. Examples include our recent flap debate, gaydar, nucular vs parapalegic, and trendy IPA usage.

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Philip is right… when it comes to developing terminology, I’ve scored some real zeroes. Underoptimization may sound icky, but I’d meant it to evoke underspecification in an OT frame, while maintaining a distinction from Lexicon Optimization. Meanwhile his post persuasively suggests that the distinction may be an unnecessary one.

Another icky word that still makes me chuckle is stipulativity, which I included in a title of a paper I presented at the LSA in Boston. (more…)

I have been following the discussion on flapping. While I tend to think that Bob is on the right track, there is one thing that really sets my teeth on edge, and that is his term “Underoptimization”. What is that supposed to mean? Sounds like a bad tune-up.

There seems to be a misconception here about what Lexicon Optimization is. Lexicon Optimization doesn’t mean that inputs have to look like outputs, or that inputs have to be fully specified either. It means only that the same grammar that determines outputs also predicts inputs. So depending on the grammar, Lexicon Optimization might imply that underlying forms are underspecified.

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Well, I’m starting to feel in over my head with the flapping and specification discussion Eric and I are having. My interpretation of Sally Thomason’s informal study (reported here) led to this exchange, in part because Eric found some unintended implications in it, and in part because I had bandied about terms like ‘underspecification’ without clarity.

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Bob is absolutely right — I grossly mischaracterized his Lexicon Underoptimization idea. (Bob concludes that my mischaracterization was “derived ultimately from [his] earlier failure to elucidate [his idea] adequately”, but I think he’s just being kind here; given that there was not a single mention of markedness in Bob’s original post, I had little if any justification for linking his thoughts about underspecification to any notion of markedness.)

Bob also makes very clear the issue with Lexicon Optimization that we’ve been discussing. When unleashed on morphemes with nonalternating [ɾ], Lexicon Optimization selects /ɾ/ and not /t/ or /d/ as the underlying representation; assuming that Sally Thomason’s experimental results tell us that the underlying representation of such forms actually has /t/, then (obviously) Lexicon Optimization makes the wrong choice. Bob’s Lexicon Underoptimization idea is meant to address exactly this problem: “when positing underlying representations, remove any feature specification that is not needed to generate the proper output”.

With all that cleared up, I still have questions — and I hope I don’t just mischaracterize Bob’s position again.

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This is my first official post, so apologies if I get things wrong, either etiquette-wise or technologically…

It would be interesting to see what assorted ‘illiterate’ subjects to with other allophones of /t/. David Stampe told me years ago of children who systematically replaced their parents’ glottal stops with slightly aspirated [t]’s in word such as ‘kitten’, ‘mitten’. This was particularly interesting since the adults never said [mIt@n].
Given his views, of course, what the children were doing was perceiving the intention and pronouncing that, since they didn’t yet control glottal stops. That doesn’t explain why children would systematically revert to the voiceless underlying target in non-alternating contexts however.
Geoff

In a discussion of the pre-OT issue of Radical vs Contrastive Underspecification, Kenstowicz (1994:508) provides what turns out to be an understatement for this week’s flapping discussion:

Finding solid evidence bearing on this issue has proved to be very difficult.

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Sharon Rose reminds me that her 4 1/2-year-old daughter Helen has been pronouncing taps in flapping contexts as [t] for quite some time now. Sharon is Canadian and her parents are English, and due in part to this background Sharon more often than not does not apply flapping herself. Helen’s father Tadesse is from Ethiopia, and there are also very few if any taps to be found in his English.

One might think, then, that Helen has picked up on the tendency in her family’s speech toward the variants without flapping. What’s interesting, though, is that Helen has [t] even where there is no [t] variant; so, words like latter and ladder are both [lætɚ] with a [t].

I have a guess about what’s going on here, consistent with what I’ve said before but probably on as flimsy a limb as what Bob said.

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