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

Well, we’re all agreed that there’s an extra nasal in this token of the word circumnavigate; we’re just not sure what it is. Eric says it sounds labial to him; Bob says it’s more likely velar. And now I’ve joined Phonoloblog for the immediate purpose of asserting my opinion that the sound in question is actually an alveolar [n]—although I hope I will have other things to say here in the future, possibly even things that are more interesting and/or less contrarian.

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Hello everybody,

John McCarthy recently sent me this link to the phonology holdings at google print:

http://print.google.com/print?q=phonology

Full text, completely searchable. It only gives you a few pages at a time, but you can just search for the next page number to keep reading.

Enjoy,

Joe.

Here and there phonoblog has links to teaching resources for phonetics and phonology. I have one to add: a recent concoction that I’ve developed to illustrate the goings on in a chain shift of vowels. In trying to put myself back in the shoes of an undergraduate, I was imagining that seeing a static vowel chart with arrows leading away from IPA symbols might be a little cryptic. (Especially in a lower-level class about language and society in which I’m not pushing them to learn IPA through and through).

Turns out wicked little Powerpoint now lets you move existing slide objects around with its animation tools, which I decided to take advantage of. I have posted some examples for you to check out: the idea is that words (representing phoneme classes) move in two-dimensional vowel space when you advance the slide. (I used words since moving the phonetic symbols is uninterpretable).

The examples are the Northern Cities Shift and the Canadian shift. In the NCS, I do not commit to a push or pull chain, but the Canadian animation suggests a pull-chain precipitated by the low-back merger. The fronting of /u/ is also to be taken with some salt; I have heard it from many Canadians, but by impression is that it has not quite arrived in the quirky little dialect of Urban Eastern Ontario English that I speak.

The Canadian slide also demonstrates a bit of a problem with the approach: limited dimensionality. Since the slides only manipulate height and backness, but not length or roundness, they risk illustrating a non-existent merger. (This is why I left off my Scottish vowel space). It is also difficult to illustrate diphthongs and monophthongs, which is why I left off my Southern vowel shift.

I’m leaving the comments open, so if you think these are (a) cool or (b) dumb you can say so.

The slides are in Office 2003’s PC version of Powerpoint, so I apologize if your platform doesn’t display it well.
Note that I had implemented a similar idea with an animated gif in the Language Samples Project, but constructing these is fairly time consuming. Also: the st__ck series is one I find particularly illustrative, and I found in it a paper by Charles Boberg.

Gmail is probably not able to tell if you’re gay, but the targeted text ads are pretty interesting. A significant amount of the mail I get at phonoloblog#gmail|com are accompanied by the following “sponsored link” for a company which happens used to be located in nearby Carlsbad, CA (recently relocated to Tybee Island, GA):

Got /r/ problems?
www.sayitright.org - The Entire World of R -the ultimate program for all 21 vocalic /r/ ’s

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From what I gather (and this has certainly been true of my brief experience here at UCSD) most research institutions require their researchers to obtain human subjects approval not only for what I’ll call (for lack of a better word) “physical” experiments — ones that involve some sort of poking or prodding of the subject, or that involve putting things in their mouths or strapping them to machines, etc. — but also for purely “verbal” experiments, such as interviews or elicitations. (more…)

On Language Log, Geoff Pullum observes a quibble about h-dropping in ecclesiastical Latin. He follows up with a contrite mea culpa, summarizing the feedback he got to the effect that word-initial [h] is standardly not pronounced in church Latin. There is also evidence that the consonant was an issue in classical Latin.

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While listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! a few weeks ago, I heard the coolest speech error: circumnavimgate for circumnavigate.

(In Adam Felber’s defense, he committed the error during the “Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank” portion of the show; it’s amazing to me that the panelists don’t commit more speech errors than they do during that time. Besides, Adam won the game that particular week, speech error notwithstanding.)

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Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman discusses the connection between Sistine Chapel smoke color and Hockett’s duality of patterning. (”More concretely, we could call it the ‘phonological principle’.”) As Mark notes at the end, “some bits of this post are recycled from [his] lecture notes for ling001″.

Back when I first started this blog in July 2004, there were two posts about publishing primary linguistic data. I’m hoping we’ll continue to talk about this here (and elsewhere), especially given the recent passage of a resolution by the LSA (in the March 2005 LSA Bulletin, but not yet posted on the LSA’s resolutions page). Doug Whalen quotes and remarks on it over on LinguistList.

“Whereas there are few institutional norms about how to recognize electronic databases in tenure and promotion cases, the Linguistic Society of America supports the recognition of electronic databases of language material as academic publications. It supports the development of appropriate means of review of such resources so that the functionality, import and scope of the projects can be assessed relative to other language resources and to theoretical papers. The LSA supports the treatment of digital resources as publications for consideration in tenure and promotion cases.”

Now if we can only get this to apply to blogging as well …

OK, one more: NELS 36 at UMass Amherst will have a special session “Topics at the Morphology-Phonology Interface”, for which Bruce Tesar is the invited speaker. Quoting from the conference website:

This session will include regular-length talks that address issues at the morphology-phonology boundary, including:

• morphological categories and boundaries in phonology
• learnability of morphological contrasts
• phonologically-conditioned allomorphy & paradigm gaps
• contrast neutralization/preservation in paradigms
• paradigm uniformity, OO-correspondence, stratal OT