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

I hadn’t heard of the Accents of English from Around the World site until I read this today. Thanks, Geoff!

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

“The Catford Tapes are a series of eight one-hour lectures given by Ian Catford in early 1985, on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Michigan Linguistics Department. For anyone with an interest in linguistics, from theoretical to applied, from English to Kabardian, from grammar to phonetics, from Henry Sweet to … well, to Ian Catford, these lectures make clear just how fascinating and remarkably broad Professor Catford’s life in linguistics has been.”

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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity

Date: 31-Jul-2008 - 02-Aug-2008
Location: Munich, Germany
Web Site: http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/cluster

Call Deadline: March 1, 2008

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

ACL Special Interest Group in Morphology and Phonology
(SIGMORPHON 2008)

Date: 19-Jun-2008 - 20-Jun-2008
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA
Email: sigmorphon2008@udel.edu
Web Site: http://phonology.cogsci.udel.edu/sigmorphon2008/

Call Deadline: March 17, 2008 Extended: March 24, 2008

Organizer Alan Yu has recently posted the schedule for the Phonologization Symposium. [ Via LINGUIST List. ]

[ See also the LINGUIST List announcement. ]

Sixteenth Manchester Phonology Meeting

22-24 MAY 2008

Deadline for abstracts: 3rd March 2008

Special session: ‘Phonology and the mental lexicon’ featuring Abby Cohn, Sarah Hawkins and Aditi Lahiri

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

Conference website: www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/16mfm.html

Following up on Nancy Hall’s discussion of the Lutfi > Lufti transposition, I’m just as curious about the growth in the same setting (i.e. celebrity journalism) of the combining form celebu- [səlɛbju], as in celebu-wreck and celebu-freak. One Google search on {celebu*} also yields celebu-world, celebu spawn, celebu-wishes, celebu-goo, celebu-shambles, celebu-trend, celebu-architect, celebu-campaign, celebu-moms, and celebutantes.

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Just announced on LINGUIST List: The Phonological Enterprise, by Charles Reiss and Mark Hale (Oxford University Press, Feb. 2008).

Re-examines foundational issues in phonology, linguistics, and cognitive science. Develops a coherent picture of the study of phonology and its relationship to other disciplines. Written with wit and in a clear and pedagogic style. This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of topics throughout the book. The competence-performance distinction and markedness theory are both addressed in some detail, especially with reference to phonological acquisition. Several aspects of Optimality Theory, including the use of Output-Output Correspondence, functionalist argumentation and dependence on typological justification are critiqued. The authors draw on their expertise in historical linguistics to argue that diachronic evidence is often mis-used to bolster phonological arguments, and they present a vision of the proper use of such evidence. Issues of general interest for cognitive scientists, such as whether categories are discrete and whether mental computation is probabilistic are also addressed. The book ends with concrete proposals to guide future phonological research.

The breadth and depth of the discussion, ranging from details of current analyses to the philosophical underpinnings of linguistic science, is presented in a direct style with as little recourse to technical language as possible.

 Anyone interested in syllable contact and metathesis should take note of the current news reports about Britney Spears. Her manager, whose real name is apparently Sam Lutfi, is frequently called Sam Lufti by reporters.

Currently, “Sam  Lutfi” gets 76,700 Google hits, while “Sam Lufti” gets 60,000.