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[ Via LINGUIST List ]

Title: Laboratory Phonology 8
Series Title: Phonology and Phonetics 4-2
Published: 2006
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter (Book URL)

Editors: Louis Goldstein, Yale University; Douglas H. Whalen, Haskins Laboratories; Catherine T. Best, MARCS Auditory Laboratories
Hardback: ISBN: 3110176785 Pages: 675 Price: U.S. $ 159.30, Euro 118.00

Abstract:

This collection of papers from Eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology (held in New Haven, CT) explores what laboratory data that can tell us about the nature of speakers’ phonological competence and how they acquire it, and outlines models of the human phonological capacity that can meet the challenge of formalizing that competence. The window on the phonological capacity is broadened by including, for the first time in the Laboratory Phonology series, work on signed languages and papers that explicitly compare signed and spoken phonologies.

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This new book (just announced on LINGUIST List) is not about phonology (at least I don’t think it is, given who wrote it and from what I can tell from the blurb). But I think it’s of particular relevance to (present-day) phonologists.

(I’m hoping that my semi-random thoughts on this below will generate some discussion here, especially if someone (else) decides to read the book.)

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[ Via LINGUIST List ]

Title: Markedness
Subtitle: Reduction and Preservation in Phonology
Series Title: Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 112
Published: 2006
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Author: Paul de Lacy, Rutgers University
Hardback: ISBN: 0521839629 Pages: 466 Price: U.S. $ 99.00
Hardback: ISBN: 0521839629 Pages: 466 Price: U.K. £ 55.00

Abstract:

‘Markedness’ refers to the tendency of languages to show a preference for particular structures or sounds. This bias towards ‘marked’ elements is consistent within and across languages, and tells us a great deal about what languages can and cannot do. This pioneering study presents a groundbreaking theory of markedness in phonology. De Lacy argues that markedness is part of our linguistic competence, and is determined by three conflicting mechanisms in the brain:
(a) pressure to preserve marked sounds (’preservation’),
(b) pressure to turn marked sounds into unmarked sounds (’reduction’), and
(c) a mechanism allowing the distinction between marked and unmarked sounds to be collapsed (’conflation’).

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[ Via LINGUIST List ]

The University of Lisbon (DLGR,Faculdade de Letras) offers a Masters Program in Linguistics (Phonetics and Phonology): Sounds and Melodies of Portuguese. The aim is to improve understanding of sound structure and provide training on various applied areas where such knowledge is needed.

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[ via LINGUIST List ]

Prosody-Syntax Interface Workshop
Run by the Centre for Human Communication, UCL

Friday 6th October 2006, 9.00 - 6.00

Keynote Speakers: Mark Steedman, Elisabeth Selkirk

All speakers (in order of talks): Fernanda Ferreira, Nicole Dehé and Vieri Samek-Lodovici, Sam Hellmuth, Mark Steedman, Lisa Cheng and Laura Downing, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Elisabeth Selkirk

Links to: program, registration, location.

As you all know, Marc van Oostendorp has been posting several useful links lately: first a link to Toshi Shiraishi’s recent Groningen dissertation on Nivkh phonology, then one to Tobias Sheer’s bibliographic web-library of papers on the phonology/morphosyntax interface, then one to the ConstraintCatalogue developed by Marc, Curt Rice, and Nathan Sanders, and most recently one to Julien Eychenne’s WYSIWYG tableau editor for LaTeX.

This is an interesting mix of useful stuff that I don’t think I would have heard about anywhere else. Shiraishi’s dissertation was (somewhat later) announced on LINGUIST List, but that’s about it — although LINGUIST List is a great resource, probably even in ways I haven’t taken advantage of yet, it’s not the place I imagine I’m going to (easily) find this kind of collection of useful stuff. (If you disagree, please comment!)

One good reason why a “one-stop shop” of resources like these would be useful to have was made clear in the comments on Marc’s most recent post: there are at least two other LaTeX tableau editors out there — the latter developed almost 10 years ago. If I were about to (decide to) embark on a programming project like this, I think I’d find it useful to know whether I was about to reinvent the wheel so that I don’t waste too much of my time.

So what should this one-stop shop be?

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OT tableaux seem to be designed with WYSIWYG editors, such as Word or WordPerfect or OpenOffice in mind. They do not come as natural to those linguists using e.g. LaTeX; it is too easy make a lot of mistakes in where one should put asterisks, etc.

Julien Eychenne, a phonology student who is finishing his PhD thesis in Toulouse right now, has written a small programme which works as a small WYSIWYG editor, just for tableaux: OTableau. Next to generating LaTeX output, the programme also calculates ‘fatal’ violations, and places exclamation marks and shading (if desired) accordingly. It’s a nice little programme.

During the second week of the PhonologyFest, earlier this year in Bloomington, Indiana, I shared an apartment with Curt Rice. One night he told me that he had a plan: wouldn’t it be nice to have a catalogue of OT constraints as they have been proposed in the literature? The IPA Guide has a list of symbols, with explanations how they are used, etc.; wouldn’t it be convenient to have such a book for constraints as well? So that you could look up who first proposed a constraint, what the alternatives are, how the constraints had been formalized by various authors, whether there have been similar proposals outside the OT literature, etc.

Talking about this a little bit further, we decided it should be a Wiki rather than a book — a website where everybody can contribute, add constraints, add background information, etc.

During the summer I wrote a few lemmas, in particular I write a first version for a page for the Onset constraint, plus several things which would be linked to such a page. In the mean time, Nathan Sanders, a graduate student at the University of Indiana, installed a Wiki server. We have now opened it.

Do you think this is a good idea? What are possible extensions? You can join ConCat and start building it with us.

Lots of folks think this blog is called phonoblog instead of phonoloblog, which was enough of a problem that I made the URL http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoblog/ automatically redirect to http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog/. (I won’t do the same with http://www.phonoloblog.org/; that costs money. A paltry sum, sure, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)

Just to be clear: this is not phonoblog. This is. (Thanks to David Beaver for the link.)

Looks like the good folks in Tromsø are having another workshop at the end of the month. (Via LINGUIST List.)

(And speaking of LINGUIST List: check out the new phonolojobs page. You’ll find it permanently in the list of pages over in the sidebar.)

This two-day workshop brings together phonologists from Tromsø with invited speakers to discuss what the phonological bases of phonological features are, as opposed to the phonetic bases stressed in much contemporary research on distinctive features. Can a purely functional approach to features explain patterns and alternations found in the world’s languages, or is there an irreducible abstract phonological core underlying them? Invited speakers are Peter Avery (York), Laura Downing (ZAS) and Wolfgang Kehrein (Amsterdam). There is no call for papers but interested people are welcome to join and discuss the issues.

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