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On LINGUIST List recently, we hear of two books that may be of interest to phonoloblog readers:

• When Languages Die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge, by K. David Harrison.
• The Phonology of Standard Chinese (2nd ed.), by San Duanmu.

The first, which I also mentioned here, is not strictly about phonology — but it’s written by a phonologist, so there you go.

Somehow, I completely missed (until just a few days ago) the existence of the truly cool Cascadilla Proceedings Project (emphasis added):

Cascadilla Proceedings Project is an imprint of Cascadilla Press. We created CPP as a new model for proceedings of linguistics conferences and workshops. All proceedings published by CPP are available both in print and on the web. Web access is free and unrestricted, and the copy available on the web is the same as the book version in content, formatting, and pagination. The print edition is a hardback which meets library binding standards. This combination allows for the best of both worlds: free and quick access for researchers looking for a proceedings paper, with all the advantages of being published in book form.

Among several other conference proceedings, there are those from the 2nd Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonetics and Phonology.

You may already be familiar with Cascadilla Press from recent book/CD proceedings of WCCFL and several other conferences, their Mac/PC-friendly Arboreal and Moraic fonts, or their fun teaching tools like IPA Bingo and Magnetic Phonetics. Now there’s just all the more reason to love the good folks at Cascadilla. While you’re browsing their site, consider buying a classroom IPA chart (or a t-shirt, coffee mug, etc.) at their new Cafe Press site. (And don’t forget to tell ‘em phonoloblog sent you.)

This post on Kai von Fintel’s Semantics etc. blog reminds me that there’s a little-publicized archive of UMass linguistics papers, searchable and browsable by subject area. Here’s the phonology area, and here’s the phonetics area; there are quite a few other areas, almost all of them populated by several papers.

Kai’s link to Kratzer & Selkirk on Spellout does not go to this archive, but rather to lingBuzz, which I first mentioned on phonoloblog just over a year ago. (more…)

This just over the LINGUIST List wire (emphasis added where appropriate):

• (link) “The 31st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium will take place February 23-25, 2007 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. [...] The PLC 31 program includes sessions on language acquisition, phonology, phonology/phonetics, semantics, semantics/pragmatics, sociolinguistics and language change, syntax and syntax/semantics. For a complete list of talks with links to abstracts, please visit http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc31/schedule.html.
• (link) “NELS 38 will be held at the University of Ottawa and will include a General Session, a Poster Session, and two Special Sessions: one on phonology (theme: ‘Abstractness without innateness?’) and one in semantics (theme: tba). Invited speakers: tba. The call for papers will be posted soon.”

That is all.

Call: 15th Manchester Phonology Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS

Fifteenth Manchester Phonology Meeting

24-26 MAY 2007

Deadline for abstracts: 1st March 2007

Special session: ‘Where is allomorphy?’, featuring (in alphabetical order) Ricardo Bermudez-Otero, Mirjam Ernestus, John McCarthy, Glyne Piggott

Held in Manchester, UK; organised through a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, the Universite Toulouse-Le Mirail, the Universite Montpellier-Paul Valery and elsewhere.

Conference website: www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/15mfm.html

(more…)

Here’s a conference on the interaction of tone and segmental features in Amsterdam in early June, organized by Marc van Oostendorp. Call deadline: March 10.

(Via LINGUIST List.)

Speaking of the LSA, readers of phonoloblog will no doubt be interested in the subject of a talk presented by members of the Chicago Language Modeling Lab (CLML) (lab director Jason Riggle and grad researchers Max Bane, James Kirby, and Jeremy O’Brien). The talk was titled “Efficiently Computing OT Typologies” (here’s the abstract) and it served several purposes: to announce Erculator (”a web-based application that lets you create OT candidate tableaux, check their consistency, make inferences and other analyses, and format them for direct inclusion in your Word or LaTeX documents”), to report on its progress (e.g., the gui is not yet fully functional, but the cli is), and to show what it can do and how it does it (drawing heavily from Alan Prince’s work on Entailed Ranking Conditions (ERCs), which you can read about here, here, here, here, and here). Go on and check it out.

Back in October I noted a number of sessions that were scheduled at the LSA last week and that might be of interest to phonologists. I’d like to invite anyone who attended any of these sessions (or anything else of phono-interest at the LSA) to offer their thoughts here on phonoloblog.

The teaching term began for me as soon as I got back from LSA, so I haven’t yet had time to write up some thoughts I had on the ominously-titled plenary panel “Phonology: An Appraisal of the Field in 2007″, but I will definitely get around to it soon.

Brazil in April, anyone? See here for details. Abstract deadline extended until January 15 (that’s this Monday).

Good question, one that some folks will attempt to answer in Paris in October (see here). Abstract deadline: April 30.