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

This cfp just out: another CUNY Phonology Forum conference brought to you by Cairns & Raimy. January 17-18, 2008 at the CUNY Graduate Center; abstracts due Nov. 10, notifications Dec. 1.

Earlier this year I noted that this year’s CUNY Phonology Forum conference had made abstracts, handouts, and audio of the talks available here — I hope they do that again. Poke around the CUNY Phonology Forum website for more information, including links to papers (and discussions thereof) from previous conferences, etc.

[ Via LINGUIST List -- where the call deadline is mistakenly listed as Jan. 1, 2000 ... ]

The 34th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society will take place Feb. 8-10, 2008. Electronic abstracts due 5pm Nov. 17. One of the invited speakers for the general session this year is Sharon Inkelas.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

András Kornai writes with the following interesting query (supplemented here with some text formatting and a Wikipedia link):

My son is in grade school, and he is learning a great deal of terminology about English spelling. For example, a digraph is a letter-combination that regularly corresponds to a single sound, sh, ck, etc. This is pretty standard. A blend is a syllable-final consonant cluster as far as I can make sense of this, welded sounds are a closed set of rhymes (ing, unk, … — there doesn’t seem to be any defining property), bonus letters are the second members of doubled (consonant) graphemes irrespective of whether the sound they represent is long or short, taps have something to do with moras, perhaps.

Google for these terms and you find plenty of school curricula that demand knowledge of these notions, most of them related to something called the “Wilson Reading System“. Is there anything out there that links this terminology to better-established linguistic notions? Has anybody produced an overview (or a critique) of the system from the perspective of contemporary phonology? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

If you know anything relevant to this query, please post your comments!

I’m still reading this month’s Vanity Fair and came across this:

The Report (pronounced with a soft t, as is Colbert) debuted in the fall of 2005 as a spin-off of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, the critical and popular success that’s often referred to by its host, Jon Stewart, as a “fake news” show.

– from Seth Mnookin’s “The Man in the Irony Mask“

I’ve heard/seen “soft” (vs. “hard”) used to refer to different non-silent pronunciations of the letters c (soft [s] vs. hard [k]), g (soft [ʒ] vs. hard [ʤ]), but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of “soft” referring to a completely silent letter in English. If anyone else has, please comment about it below.

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The NELS 38 program was just announced on LINGUIST List in text form, but check out the colorful two-page PDF poster that the organizers have put together. It looks like the abstracts will eventually be posted here.

You can immediately see how well-represented phonology is this year from the program poster, which is color-coded: phonology in dark red, syntax in dark blue, semantics in light blue (and invited talks in yellow — only talks, not posters). Counting them up, I see 12 phonology talks (plus Bruce Hayes, invited speaker for the ‘Abstractness without Innateness’ workshop), 22 syntax talks (plus Rose-Marie Déchaine, invited speaker for the main session), and 18 semantics talks (plus two invited speakers, Irene Heim for the ‘Pronouns and Binding Theory’ workshop and Gennaro Chierchia for the main session) … certainly not even, but better than I’ve sometimes seen.

I wish I had the time to go this year; looks fun! For those who can be in Ottawa on Oct. 26-28, note that the early registration deadline is Sept. 30.

The program for the “Problems with surface-based generalizations” meeting, to take place Oct. 8-9, has been announced on LINGUIST List.

GLOW 31 will take place at Newcastle University March 26-28, sandwiched by workshops on March 25 and 29. Arto Anttila is one of the invited speakers, no doubt in relation to the first of the five workshops, “Categorical phonology and gradient facts”. Two of the other workshops are of potential interest to phonologists: “Language contact” and “Principles of linearization” (I’m looking at you, Raimy).

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]