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

That’s the title of Bob Ladd’s talk at the Recursion in Human Languages conference, organized by Dan Everett and scheduled to take place in Illinois in late April 2007. (See the full program here; Bob’s talk, scheduled last on Saturday afternoon, is one of only two talks that seem to specifically address phonology.)

I’m glad that a phonetician/phonologist of Bob’s stature and respectability was invited to this conference. I also like the title of his talk (although this may just be the topic of the talk, not the actual title, according to the call for papers — but I hope Bob keeps it).

I’d like to throw this question out to phonologists (those who read phonoloblog, anyway). What do you think ‘recursion’ would mean in phonology? Maybe if we get some good discussion going, we can forward it on to Bob (or invite him to join in on the conversation). Leave your comment below, or if it’s something extensive, consider writing a separate post. (If you’re not already a phonoloblog author, all you have to do is ask me.)

Here are a few books recently announced on LINGUIST List of potential interest to phonoloblog readers.

• Phonology in Context, ed. by Martha C. Pennington (Palgrave Advances series)
• Prosodic Orientation in English Conversation, by Beatrice Szczepek Reed (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Natural Language and Universal Grammar, Volume 1, by John Lyons (Cambridge University Press)
• Sound Symbolism, ed. by Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, and John J. Ohala (Cambridge University Press)

Mmm, tasty.

If you’re interested in French, look here and here. (Via LINGUIST List.)

[ Via LINGUIST List, though for some reason tucked under the incorrect heading Review: Language Acquisition: Sorace et al. (2006) ]

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-821.html

AUTHOR: Hansen, Jette G.

TITLE: Acquiring a Non-Native Phonology

SUBTITLE: Linguistic Constraints and Social Barriers

PUBLISHER: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

YEAR: 2006

Andrea G. Osburne, Department of English, Central Connecticut State University

The process of adult acquisition of a second language phonology is a lengthy one, which makes it particularly difficult to study. It is hard to follow learners across years and decades to watch the process unfold, so, as the author of this monograph points out, the majority of studies have been synchronic rather than longitudinal. They have therefore focused on more salient transfer and developmental phenomena with less information about long-term processes. Hansen proposes to remedy this situation by reporting on a year-length study of the English phonological acquisition of two adult Vietnamese speakers.

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I’ve just finished writing the first version of OTtablx, a sorely-needed LaTeX package that draws nicer OT tableau than is possible with the standard tabular environment.

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[ Via LINGUIST List ]

Date: 08-Dec-2006 - 08-Dec-2006

Location: Groningen, Netherlands

Contact: Tamas Biro

Contact Email: birotnytud.hu

Meeting URL: http://www.let.rug.nl/~birot/comp-phonology.php

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Phonology

Meeting Description:

A workshop on computational aspects of phonology will be held at the University of Groningen (RUG), the Netherlands, on December 8, 2006. For further information, please visit http://www.let.rug.nl/~birot/comp-phonology.php.

The workshop is open to anyone, but we kindly ask you to register not later than December 4. For a provisional program, abstracts and registration, please visit the site. Should you have any question, please feel free to contact Tamás Bíró at birotnytud.hu.

Mark Donohue has posted a summary of responses to his original LINGUIST List query on glottal stops and codas (cross-posted here).

Mark adds via e-mail (paragraphs are from two separate messages):

I’m pretty sure some of the New Guinea data I’m looking at shows segmental nasals ONLY appearing in coda positions, phonologically, though due to nasal spreading from nasal vowels they are heard in onsets as well, if there’s no other recourse.

To elaborate briefly on the nasals: in Damal there are three phonetic nasals, predictably [m], [n] and [ŋ]. [ŋ] only ever appears as a coda; [m] and [n] do their best to appear in coda positions always (including VNV sequences), but can be found in onsets if they have to be (#NV# sequences are found), but there’s strong evidence that these are underlying /D/ + nasalised vowel).

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I’ve just revamped and updated the phonolojobs page (always accessible in the “Pages” area of the sidebar). In case you missed it when I first mentioned it — I lazily buried it in a post about something else, after all — the phonolojobs page is meant to be a place to collect ads for jobs of specific interest to us phono-types. It partially duplicates LINGUIST List in this regard, but I still think it’s helpful (and hope you all think so, too).

The revamping is noted on the phonolojobs page itself so I won’t say anything else about that here (other than to note that it’s del.icio.us). As far as the updating goes, I had a little catching up to do — in particular, I heard about three (count ‘em, three!) general linguistics jobs at UC Irvine that, as far as I can tell, have not been announced on LINGUIST List or anywhere else that is readily accessible.

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In an earlier post (7/20/2006), I asked for examples of liquid dissimilation in English, such as omitting /r/ in the(r)mometer, Feb(r)uary, su(r)prise, etc.

There also seem to be cases where an /r/ is inserted into words that already contain an /r/. Some examples I’ve heard or had reported to me include:

1. farmiliar
2. contractural
3. ardurous (the OED gives this as a ‘poetic variant’)
4. verneer (would you trust this dentist?)
5. fruneral (African American English)
6. borogroves (this has entered the epigraphic record, conveniently for future philologists)
7. perservere
8. sherbert
9. phertographer
10. catergorize
11. lavartory
12. Kervorkian
13. intergral
14. perjorative

There are also historical examples like cartridge from cartouche, and treasury from thesauria.
This process is interesting because it is the reverse of long-distance dissimilatory loss of /r/. The existence of such a reverse process is predicted by Ohala’s theory that dissimilation results from hypercorrection on the part of the listener. According to this theory, the long-domain acoustic cues of /r/ can cause the listener to be uncertain whether there is one source of rhoticity in the word or two. Errors are possible in either direction.

Has anyone noticed other cases of this?