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

The program for WCCFL 26 (at Berkeley, April 27-29) was announced on LINGUIST List the other day. There are three phonology sessions this year, one each day.

Phonology 1 (Friday 10-12)

• Bidirectional stress systems
  Brett Hyde (Washington University)
• Explaining nonfinality: Evidence from Finnish
  Daniel Karvonen (University of Minnesota)
• Vowel sonority and coda weight
  Matthew Gordon, Carmen Jany, Carlos Nash, and Nobutaka Takara (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• More velar than /g/: Consonant coarticulation as a cause of diphthongization
  Adam Baker (University of Arizona), Jeff Mielke (University of Ottawa), and Diana Archangeli (University of Arizona)

Phonology 2 (Saturday 2-4)

• Second occurrence focus and the acoustics of prominence
  Jonathan Howell (Cornell University)
• Phonological constraints on constituent ordering
  Arto Antilla (Stanford University)
• Prosody can outrank syntax
  David Teeple (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• Speakers’ sensitivity to the markedness of unattested onsets
  Iris Berent (Florida Atlantic University), Donca Steriade (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Tracy Lennertz (Florida Atlantic University)

Phonology 3 (Sunday 10-12)

• On selective harmony systems in Bantu and the Kikongo solution
  Fidele Mpiranya (University of Chicago)
• When exceptions are encoded at the segmental level
  Michal Martinez (University of Southern California)
• Learning bias as a factor in phonological typology
  Elliot Moreton (University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill)
• Gestural alignment constraints and vowel devoicing in Andean Spanish
  Ann Delforge (University of California, Davis)

The phoneme can be roughly defined as a minimal unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words in a language. The question of how to theoretically define the phoneme dominated linguistics from the late 19th century until about 1960. In 1959, Morris Halle first published his famous argument against the “classical phoneme” in his monograph The Sound Pattern of Russian. Halle and Chomsky reiterated that argument in The Sound Pattern of English, which had been widely circulated in the 1960s in various manuscript forms before it was published in 1968. The argument, now familiar to most linguists, had to do with an asymmetry in the Russian phoneme inventory. Halle had noticed that Russian regressive voice assimilation produced both phonemic and allophonic outputs. That is, it could produce a phonemic output /z/ from an underlying /s/ or an allophonic variant [ɣ] from an underlying /x/. If one were to posit a significant level of classical phonemic representation in a phonological derivation, then it would be necessary to apply regressive assimilation twice–above and below the level of phonemic representation. Hence, classical phonemic representation had to be ruled out as a significant level of phonological representation. This argument basically signaled the death of the phoneme in early generative phonological theory. As a consequence, the input to phonological derivations became the level of systematic phonemics, which captured generalizations about morphophonological alternations, a considerably more abstract level of representation than in classical phonemic theories.

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Call for posters: Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology

• Date: 6-8 July, 2007
• Location: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, U.S.A.
• Contact Persons: Arto Anttila & Lauren Hall-Lew
• Meeting email: variation07@gmail.com
• Web Site: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/linginst/nsf-workshop/workshop-july-2007.html

Abstract deadline: April 30, 2007

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Hello, I’ve just seen it yet again (”it” = the phenomenon I’m about to describe) and I am intrigued enough to use the Phonoloblog to solicit other phonologists’ views.

Russian is claimed in the research literature to have Final Devoicing; i.e. all obstruents are realized as voiceless in word-final position, irrespective of whether they are underlyingly voiced or voiceless. Yet, when I elicit these forms from Russian speakers I’ve met (usually, students in my classes), I get either partially devoiced or even fully voiced forms - certainly not neutralization of /b/ with /p/, /d/ with /t/, etc.

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The University of Maryland’s Linguistics Department continues its strange love-hate relationship with phonology with this year’s announcement for what has come to be known simply as “MayFest“. In case you’ve never heard of this (almost-)annual workshop, the first sentence of the announcement clarifies:

Every year the graduate students of the Linguistics Department of the University of Maryland organize a linguistics workshop focusing on a different aspect of language.

The rest of the first paragraph explains the title of this year’s workshop: “Where, When and Why is Hierarchy Needed?”

The goal of this year’s MayFest is to bring together researchers from various disciplines to discuss the use of hierarchy and flat structures in language.

Where do phonologists these days stand on this issue? Are debates about the internal structure of the syllable actually resolved? What about Liberman & Prince’s original hierarchical foot structure proposal — was that abandoned for good reasons? It’s true that discussions in phonology don’t (or no longer) focus on these issues, but I don’t think they’re any less important than they are in syntax and semantics. (more…)

This LINGUIST List post alerted me to the fact that four of the eleven thematic sessions so far planned for this year’s Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) in September are quite obviously phonology-related:

• Slavic phonotactics (Organisers: Eugeniusz Cyran and Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk)
• The syntax/phonology interface and beyond (in either direction) (Organisers: Tobias Scheer and Jacek Witkoś)
• Dynamic phonology (Organiser: Geoffrey Schwartz)
• Advances in natural language and speech processing (Organisers: Krzysztof Jassem and Grzegorz Krynicki)

Abstracts are due May 1. (Submission guidelines here.)

As advertised on LINGUIST List, the program for Andries Coetzee’s Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory workshop, to be held in Ann Arbor on May 18-20, is now available.

February 28 was the official publication date of The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, previously mentioned here!

The hardcover version costs $150/£80. After selling off a batch of these to libraries, we can hope that CUP will seriously consider issuing a less expensive soft cover version (and, reportedly, an e-book too).

The final component of the Handbook experience - the website - is also now ready. It has some useful features:

• You can search the entire text of the book, making it the most searchable printed book available.
• You can search the references and download them in a variety of formats.
• There is a forum for people to discuss the chapters (and phonology in general). Please encourage your students to use it!
• It has additional material (e.g., ‘further reading’ lists that many authors have provided, errata, etc.). There may eventually be other things available related to each chapter (e.g., handouts, related papers, teaching materials, webpage links, audio, video…).

Thanks to Handbook editor Paul de Lacy for putting such extraordinary work into this!