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After my post about using an when an immediately following parenthetical begins with a consonant (but the first word after the parenthetical begins with a vowel), I felt the need to get some Google counts. What follows are the stats for strings of the form “a/an to me (at least/anyway) X”.

The finding is that Julian Barnes is not alone: there are a lot of people out there writing things like an–to me–unknown singer.

I wonder about the converse: a–obviously–preposterous idea. I easily found an example, “a (obviously refurbished) replacement unit”, but didn’t investigate systematically (and it seems there are a lot of people typing things like “displayed with a obviously wrong pixel ratio”, so we need to control for baseline use of a before vowels).

Tables and graphs come after the jump…

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Page 57 of the Dec. 25, 2006/Jan. 1, 2007 New Yorker, in a piece by Julian Barnes called “The past conditional“:

In the car on the way back to London, we had an–to me–even more peculiar exchange about my niece and her boyfriend.

Two theories:

1. For Julian Barnes or an editor, a/an allomorph choice can skip over a parenthetical.
2. It’s just an error; Barnes and editors would have changed it if they’d noticed it. Maybe Barnes wrote an even more peculiar exchange and inserted to me later, neglecting to change an to a.

Still, it makes me wonder. Are there English speakers for whom the choice between a and an can (or must??) ignore, in some circumstances, what immediately follows? If so, what are the syntactic or prosodic conditions?

And if not–if all English speakers would consider the above example to be an error–how common are speech errors in which the choice between a and an gets locked in before the speaker decides to insert some more material? Does the error’s frequency vary as a function of syntax or prosody? I pose these as serious questions: maybe someone has looked at this, if not for a/an then maybe for a similar case.

What do you think of a/an before um and other hesitations? I can’t decide what I think about these (imagine the following as fairly fluent utterances):

• It’s a(n), um, strong argument.
• It’s a(n), um, uneven surface.

(I can imagine at least three possibilities: always use a before um; always use an before um; always act as though the um weren’t there, assuming you’ve already got the next word lined up in your speech plan.)

Hello, I just finished teaching UCLA’s “Introduction to Linguistics” course.  This is ten weeks of syntax, morphology, semantics, phonetics, phonology, and historical, and since there are so many topics it all goes by pretty fast.

In the phonology section, I have been dutifully teaching the classical phoneme and how to discover it (that is to say, the collection of minimal pairs and collation of complementary environments for similar sounds).  I would imagine that this is the practice in many other intro courses.

What occurred to me while I was teaching this was that phonemic analysis might better be postponed to a later course such as (at UCLA) “Introduction to Phonology”.  The alternative that I have in mind would be to let the phonology section of Intro Linguistics focus exclusively on phonological alternations and neutralizing rules. 

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[ Note to regular phonoloblog readers: this is a follow-up on my last Language Log post, on the Chilean Spanish pronunciation of Pinochet. ]

Here is a key for redirected Language Log readers who may not be familiar with phonetic terms and transcriptions. The phonetic value of any other symbols used below should be transparent. (IPA = International Phonetic Alphabet, APA = [North] American[ist] Phonetic Alphabet):

• The sound that is usually represented orthographically by “ch” in English (as in e.g. chain) is a voiceless postalveolar affricate and is represented as either [ʧ] (IPA) or [č] (APA).
• The sound that is usually represented orthographically by “sh” in English (as in e.g. shame) is a voiceless postalveolar fricative and is represented as either [ʃ] (IPA) or [š] (APA).
• The sound that has no single usual orthographic representation in English but is sometimes represented as “zh” (as in e.g. measure) is a voiced postalveolar fricative and is represented as either [ʒ] (IPA) or [ž] (APA).

To double-check my claims about different American Spanish varieties, I first consulted the superb book by D. Lincoln Canfield pictured and Amazon.com-linked on the right. According to the book description, “[t]his book represents the culmination of a lifetime of research in the spoken Spanish dialects of the Americas by one of the foremost experts in this field.” Indeed. Canfield makes the useful organizational decision to devote a separate chapter to the discussion of pronunciation patterns found in each country on the continent (including the U.S.), though he is clear about the fact that differences between varieties of a language do not necessarily respect national boundaries (pp. 20-21). Each chapter includes a map (in some cases, multiple maps) highlighting certain key (geographically-definable) pronunciation patterns. It’s an amazing piece of work, mercifully short (130pp.), and at $14 from Amazon.com, a real steal. (Makes a great gift, too!)

But: this book was published a full generation ago (1981), so it’s getting a little out of date. To supplement this, then, I also consulted the two books pictured and Amazon.com-linked below the fold.

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If you’re at all interested in Spanish dialect phonology — or just in the matter of the pronunciation of the now-dead Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet’s last name — check out my latest post on Language Log.

The fourth edition of the Old-World Conference in Phonology (Συνέδριο Φωνολογίας της Γηραιάς Ηπείρου 4) will take held from Jan. 19-21, 2007 on the beautiful island of Rhodes, Greece. The conference will be preceded by a workshop on Vowel Harmony in the Languages of the Mediterranean on January 18. More information on OCP 4, including the programme and all abstracts, can be found on the website of the organisers.

OCP started in Leiden, the Netherlands, in January 2003, as a follow-up to the HILP Conferences in the 1990s. OCP2 took place in Tromsø, Norway, in January 2005, and OCP3 in Budapest, Hungary, in January 2006. Most probably, OCP5 will be organized in Toulouse, France, in January 2008.

There is some discussion going on over at Certain Doubts that may be of interest to readers of this blog, whether you choose to make your work available on ROA, lingBuzz, your own website, or nowhere at all. (Via Kai von Fintel’s del.icio.us links.)

(Further discussion here is also welcome, of course.)

We’ve got a one-year phonology job in my department for next academic year and would like to encourage interested people to apply. The official announcement is as follows:

The UCLA Department of Linguistics is conducting a search to fill a one-year visiting faculty position in the field of phonology. The visitor will teach a normal load of four one-quarter courses (covering both undergraduate and graduate levels) and participate in the meetings and activities of the department’s phonology research group. Salary will be based on the UCLA faculty scale, with benefits according to the standard UCLA benefits package.

Applicants are requested to send materials in hard copy, including vita, cover letter describing experience and interests for both research and teaching, sample papers, and documentation (in any form desired) of teaching record. Applicants should also request three letters of recommendation to be sent from individuals familiar with their work. Please indicate if you will be attending the January meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where interviews will be conducted. Questions about the position may be directed to the search committee chair at bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu.

The address for application materials is: Bruce Hayes, Chair, Phonology Search Committee, Department of Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543

Deadline: January 2, 2007.

UCLA is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.

[ Via LINGUIST List ]

EDITORS: Hua, Zhu; Dodd, Barbara

TITLE: Phonological Development and Disorders in Children

SUBTITLE: A Multilingual Perspective

SERIES: Child Language and Child Development

PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters

YEAR: 2006

ISBN: 1853598895

ANNOUNCED IN: http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1457.html

This volume is a collection of articles describing typical and atypical articulatory and phonological development in a variety of languages of very different types. As part of the Multilingual Matters’ series on Child language and child development: Multilingual-multicultural perspectives, the book aims to use multilingual studies to deepen our understanding of universals of developmental phonology. Its stated aim is “to integrate research on a range of languages to examine phonological acquisition and disorder.”

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Trochees tend to be even, iambs are usually uneven. Since Hayes (1985) it is believed that this distinction has a basis in an extralinguistic principle of rhythmic grouping:

• Elements contrasting in intensity naturally form groupings with initial
  prominence.
• Elements contrasting in duration naturally form groupings with final
  prominence.

It is believed that this ‘iambic/trochaic law’ reflects a universal cognitive tendency. But new research in musical theory seems to put this into question: adherence to the iambic/trochaic law seems to be partly dependent on the native language of the speaker. A group of researcher led by Aniruddh Patel found that speakers of (American) English conformed to the Iambic/Trochaic Law, but speakers of Japanese do not (see this summary in New Scientist). They argue that this difference in judgement is based on a difference in the syntactic structures of the languages in question, and in consequence that musical (rhythmic) perception is based at least partly on grammar. I suppose this puts into question the argument on the ‘groundedness’ of the iambic trochaic law.