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

According to this LINGUIST List posting, the abstract deadline for the 4th Old World Conference on Phonology (OCP 4), to be held in Rhodes (Jan. 19-21, 2007), has been extended until Sept. 7 (one week from Thursday). The conference is preceded by a one-day workshop (on Jan. 18) on “Harmony in the Languages of the Mediterranean”. The invited speakers for the conference are Outi Bat-El, Junko Ito, Armin Mester, and Moira Yip.

What do you think are the most important results in phonology? What have we learned and why is it important?

I spend a lot of time with non-academics and so I’m often pressed to explain what phonology is and why anyone should care. Beyond, “all knowledge is interesting” and vague statements about cognition or computer applications I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what to say. What are your thoughts?

In case you missed the call on LINGUIST List, Andries Coetzee is organizing a workshop on Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory at UMich, with René Kager and Joe Pater as invited speakers. From the call for papers:

Over the past few decades, experimental data have been used increasingly as evidence in phonological theorizing. This is no less true of Optimality Theory (OT) as is evidenced by the growing body of OT literature that uses experimental data. The purpose of this workshop is twofold. On the one hand, we want to investigate the extent to which experimental data can be used to fine-tune OT analyses. On the other hand, we want to consider the challenges that non-categorical experimental data may pose to OT.

[...] For the purpose of this workshop, we give a broad interpretation to “experimental approaches”, so that it includes experiments as diverse as psycholinguistic/processing tasks (word-likeness, phoneme identification, lexical decision, etc.), as well acoustic/articulatory experiments. We also do not want to limit contributions to papers that argue for OT. Papers that use experimental evidence to point out shortcomings of OT are equally welcome. Lastly, it is not required that a submission contributes new experimental data. Papers that deal with the general challenges posed to OT by non-categorical experimental data can also be submitted.

My wife Karen talks funny, and it’s often of more than passing linguistic interest. Most recently, she has taken to calling different berries by the following truncated names:

• blueberries [blu:bɛɹi:z] → bluebs [blu:bz]
• strawberries [stɹɔ:bɛɹi:z] → strawbs [stɹɔ:bz]
• raspberries [ɹæspbɛɹi:z] or [ɹæzbɛɹi:z] → raspbs [ɹæspəbz]

It’s the last one that interested me the most, so I asked Karen how she’d handle boysenberries [bɔɪzənbɛɹi:z]. She thought about it, at first said [bɔɪzənbz] and decided that couldn’t be right, then settled on [bɔɪzənɪbz].

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Here’s just some thoughts I’ve been mulling over on representing segment length. I’d love to get feedback. I’m a bit rusty since I haven’t really thought hard about phonology for a couple of years.

It seems that representational theories of segment length (two-root theory or moraic theory) are pretty good at addressing some basic properties of long segments. For example, in some cases length is preserved (compensatory lengthening) when the segment degeminates. That fact makes sense if the length is represented as double linking to a timing slot and degemination is simply unlinking to the extra slot, leaving it free to relink somewhere more hospitable.

But, an interesting issue with both two-root theory and moraic theory is that length really seems to be a binary distinction. (more…)