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

Lots of interesting stuff going on at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the LSA in Anaheim in January, as can be appreciated from the 11-page preliminary program. There are lots of regular sessions dedicated to aspects of phonetics or phonology; these are quickly listed below the fold in case you’re interested in scanning them before tackling the whole program. (There are of course also many relevant talks tucked into various other sessions, most of them psycholinguistically-oriented from what I can tell.)

What I want to do here is draw attention to the following special organized sessions of particular interest to phoneticians/phonologists, etc.

1. Plenary Panel — Phonology: An Appraisal of the Field in 2007
   • Organizers: Larry Hyman and Ellen Kaisse
   • Discussants: Abigail Cohn, Bruce Hayes, Larry Hyman, Paul Kiparsky, and Donca Steriade
   • Thursday 7:30pm-8:30pm, Friday 9:00am-12:00pm.
2. Approaches to Language Complexity
   • Organizers: David Harrison and Ryan Shosted
   • Panelists: Ian Maddieson, Johanna Nichols, Francois Pellegrino, Sheri Wells-Jensen, Doug Whalen
   • Friday 9:00am-12:00pm.
3. Endangered Languages and Linguistic Theory
   • Organizer: Alice Harris on behalf of CELP
   • Speakers: Sally McConnell-Ginet, Juliette Blevins, Heidi Harley, Stephen R. Anderson, Mark Baker and Maria Polinsky
   • Friday 2:00pm-5:00pm
4. Towards an artificial grammar learning paradigm in phonology
   • Organizers: Anne Pycha, Eurie Shin and Ryan Shosted
   • Chair: John Ohala
   • Speakers: Jennifer Cole, Hahn Koo, Sharon Peperkamp, Katrin Skoruppa, Anne Pycha, Eurie Shin, Ryan Shosted, Amanda Seidl, Eugene Buckley, Alejandrina Cristia, and Colin Wilson
   • Saturday 9:00am-12:00pm
5. Paradigms in Morphological Change
   • Organizers: Claire Bowern, Andrew Garrett, and Alice Harris
   • Speakers: Adam Albright, Claire Bowern, Andrew Garrett, Alice Harris, Brian Joseph, Harold Koch
   • Saturday 2:00pm-5:00pm
6. Symposium on Vowel Phonology and Ethnicity
   • Organizers: Malcah Yaeger-Dror and Erik R. Thomas
   • Cosponsored by CEDL and ADS
   • Participants: Bridget Anderson, Claire Andres, John Baugh, Angus Bowers, Jeannine Carpenter, Becky Childs, Robin Dodsworth, Sylvie Dubois, David Durian, Christine Mallinson, Jennifer Nguyen, Thea Strand, Erik R. Thomas, Ben Torbert, Rachel Votta, Michael Wroblewski, Malcah Yaeger-Dror
   • Sunday 9:00am-12:00pm

(more…)

[ Via LINGUIST List ]

Interdisciplinary Workshop ‘The Phonetics of Laughter’

Date: 05-Aug-2007 - 05-Aug-2007

Location: Saarbruecken, Germany

Contact Person: Juergen Trouvain

Meeting Email: trouvaincoli.uni-sb.de

Web Site: http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/conf/laughter-07/

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Phonetics

Call Deadline: 16-Mar-2007

Meeting Description:

Research investigating the production, acoustics and perception of laughter is
very rare. This is striking because laughter occurs as an everyday and highly
communicative phonetic activity in spontaneous discourse. This workshop aims to
bring researchers together from various disciplines to present their data,
methods, findings, research questions, and ideas on the phonetics of laughter
(and smiling).

(more…)

Just announced on LINGUIST List — Sociolinguistics Archive. Very cool (and lots of stuff of interest to phoneticians and phonologists).

If you’re into schwa, this conference is for you. (Via LINGUIST List.)

Full Title: Schwa(s) - 5èmes Journées d’Études Linguistiques

Short Title: JEL’2007

Date: 27-Jun-2007 - 28-Jun-2007

Location: Nantes, France

Contact Person: Olivier Crouzet

Web Site: http://www.lettres.univ-nantes.fr/lling/jel2007/

Call Deadline: 18-Dec-2006

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I was thinking about how many distinct types of consonants there are and came up with a back-of-the-envelope figure of 300. The IPA has about 130 different consonant symbols and then there are some other diacritics and length to factor in, so I guess about 300. Of course that’s assuming that the IPA symbols line up with the actual diversty of consonants.

Has anyone tried a more rigorous quantification?

[ Via LINGUIST List ]

AUTHOR: Julia Schlüter
TITLE: Rhythmic Grammar: The influence of rhythm on grammatical variation and
changes in English
SERIES: Topics in English Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2005

Reviewed by Mark Campana, Department of English, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

SUMMARY

This book presents a corpus-based test of a simple idea, that English favors an alternating pattern of stressed/non-stressed syllables in word and phrase structure. The Principle of Rhythmic Alternation can be discerned in texts dating from the 16th century to the present, and has (the author argues) influenced the development of the language in subtle ways. It begins by examining the distribution of competing forms, e.g. ‘worse’ and ‘worser’. Although ‘worse’ has always been the suppleted form of ‘bad’, most other comparatives had an –er ending (e.g. ‘richer’), so there was considerable pressure to fill out the paradigm. These two forms competed with each other from late medieval times, but ‘worser’ persisted longer than it should have in prenominal position before eventually dying out. The reason is that ‘worser’ contains an extra (weak) syllable, which the rhythmic grammar favors as a buffer between the stressed syllable of the adjective itself and the typically stressed first syllable of the noun it modifies. ‘Worser’ gave way to ‘worse’ much sooner in other syntactic environments where the specter of a stress clash did not arise. In other words, the preference for rhythmic alternation tipped the scales in favor of one syntactic variant over another.

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A query from Mark Donohue, via LINGUIST List:

Dear all,

Glottal stops in north Australian languages are phonotactically constrained to only appear in codas; some languages of adjacent Indonesia with glottal stops either show restrictions on their position (Sawu/Hawu: glottal stops cannot begin words) or evidence for repositioning (Palu’e: glottal stops cannot begin a word, and vowels preceding a medial glottal stop show closed-syllable allophones.

Does anyone know of anything addressing the position in which glottal stops may appear? I’m not talking about initial epenthetic glottal stops in languages such as Tagalog, but underlying segments that appear to disfavour onset realisations.

-Mark Donohue
Monash University

[ Via LINGUIST List ]

Title: Korean Phonology: A Principle-based Approach
Series Title: LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 12
Published: 2006
Publisher: Lincom GmbH

Author: Duck-Young Lee
Paperback: ISBN: 3895862207 Pages: 250 Price: Europe EURO 69.10

Abstract:

This book presents an attempt to investigate major issues in Korean phonology in terms of principles and elements, based on the framework of Government Phonology. It begins with an introductory section, describing central aspects of the framework, which include recent development in the theory with regard to the representation of ATR and coronals. An analysis of a wide range of data in Korean phonology is then provided. In dealing with data involving vowels, the study first discusses vowel harmony, which has traditionally been treated as the result of the harmonic opposition between ‘light vowels’ and ‘dark vowels’. It address some unsolved problems in previous analyses by proposing a phonological operation called ‘A-head alignment’. This will be followed by an element-based analysis of vowel coalescence and diphthongisation.

(more…)

[ Via LINGUIST List ]

Title: Tyvan
Series Title: Languages of the World/ Materials 257
Published: 2006
Publisher: Lincom GmbH

Authors:
K. David Harrison, Yale University; Gregory David Anderson, University of Manchester
Loose Leaf: ISBN: 389586529X Pages: 80 Price: Europe EURO 42.00

Abstract:

Tyvan (aka Tuvan/Tuvinian) is spoken by 150-200,000 people in the Republic of Tyva in south centra Siberia. Tyvan (along with the closely related Tofalar) stand out among the Turkic languages in several ways. Tyvan has three sets of phonemic vowels: plain, long, and creaky voice. Word-initially obstruents exhibit a contrast between unaspirated/aspirated or voiced/voiceless, depending on the speaker. There is also a phonemically marginal series of long nasalized vowels. Tyvan has only one inflectional series for verbs, prefering enclitic pronominals in most forms (in main clauses).

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Just in case you haven’t been following it, there’s an interesting thread developing on Language Log about the issue of whether Neil Armstrong said “one small step for man” or “one small step for a man”, complete with waveforms and spectrograms and other things of phonolo-interest.

1. One
   small step backwards
2. One
   75-millisecond step before a “man”
3. Armstrong’s abbreviated article: the smoking gun?
4. Armstrong’s abbreviated article: notes from the expert
5. First
   Korean on the moon!
6. What
   Neil Armstrong said
7. Armstrong’s abbreviated article: Peter Shann Ford responds