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In case you haven’t seen this ad on Linguist List:

The UCLA Department of Linguistics is seeking to fill either a one-year, full-time lecturer position or a series of part-time teaching positions in the area of Phonology for the 2008-2009 academic year.

The one-year, full-time lecturer position would involve teaching 5 courses (over 3 quarters), including two offerings of introductory undergraduate phonology, one of intermediate undergraduate phonology, and two other courses to be negotiated. Salary is approximately $50,000 for the academic year.

If we are unable to fill the one-year lecturer position, we will seek to hire one or more instructors for the following courses: introductory undergraduate phonology (twice: Fall Quarter 2008, Winter Quarter 2009) and intermediate undergraduate phonology (Spring Quarter 2009, could also be taught in Winter). Pay level is approximately $8,000 per course.

Please send applications in electronic form to Prof. Bruce Hayes [to reduce his spam, I'll ask you to find Bruce's web page and get his e-mail address from there--the phonologist Bruce Hayes is not to be confused with the one-man band or swimmer of the same name]. Applications should include a cover letter, CV, and whatever information the applicant may wish to include as evidence of a strong teaching record (these may be course evaluation data, course materials, and/or recommendation letters). Please specify whether you are interested in the full-time lecturer position or the part-time position (or both); for the part-time position, please indicate which course(s) and quarter(s).

UCLA is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and has a strong commitment to the achievement of excellence and diversity among its faculty and staff.

A crucial point in Well’s argumentation against static approaches to alternation comes from Latin. Interestingly, his point seems to argue at the same time against rule ordering, although neither Wells nor Goldsmith mention this point.

In Latin, pat-tus becomes passus and met-tus becomes messus. This is very difficult to understand in a ’static’ way (Wells even calls this ‘fatal’, as Goldsmith points out), for instance by only using output constraints. We cannot invoke a constraint *ts and/or a constraint *st, because words such as etsi and este stay unaffected. Only /t/’s which are adjacent to underlying /t/’s turn into [s]. As far as I can see, the only OT mechanism ever proposed which could do this kind of analysis are two-level constraints (which I don’t think anybody is seriously working with).

On the other hand, we can deal with this phenomenon in a ‘dynamic’ way, by positing rules of the following type:

• t->s / _ + t
• t->s / t + _

But we can only do this if we do not order these rules, but let them apply simultaneously. As soon as we order the rules they do not work, or the etsi/este problem arises again. That is the reason why the two-level constraint approach to this is the only one which works as far as I can see: Sympathy, Stratal OT, Comparative Markedness, OT-CC, etc. are all too ‘derivational’.

There also is no clear representational solution (changing a geminate /t/ to a geminate [s], leaving singletons unaffected), since it seems to be a crucial condition that there is a morpheme boundary between the /t/’s.

These thus are very important data, if they are real. Does anybody know about this? Has anybody ever tried to analyze this alternation?

This is a follow up to a quick comment I left in the Reading Group thread. I am not entirely up on the history of the field, so maybe these points are trivial. If so, excuse me.

I found the discussion of rule ordering in section 5 to be interesting. There seem to be a couple of issues that popped up with regard to rule ordering in the 1940s. One is historicity–how seriously are we going to take the time/motion metaphor? Another is the issue of primacy–if a, b, and c are derivable from one source, which one, if any, is primary? And a third is Harris’ claim that extrinsic rule ordering masks natural relationships between classes of derivations.

The first and last issues seem especially interesting after the Mr. Verb Kerfluffle. One of the things that was suggested there was that if you have rules, rule ordering is natural. Goldsmith shows that for some phonologists in the 1940s, rule ordering wasn’t a natural step at all. And it seems to me that a lot of phonology after SPE was concerned with addressing that last bit–making the rule ordering natural (there might be something about the Elsewhere Condition here, but I don’t feel qualified to talk about it).

What put me in mind of the richness of the base (RoB) was the middle part about primacy. RoB is the OT claim that the set of possible inputs to the grammar is universal, thus getting rid of the issue of primacy. In the hypothetical case of a, b, and c the grammar has to make sure that whatever the input /a/, /b/, /c/, etc., nothing maps to b in an environment where b is disallowed. Although RoB doesn’t rule out the use of archiphonemes (or underspecification) it does make them seem unneccesary since you can construct a grammar that will always map a and b to c in the appropriate context for example.

Last week I suggested some of us read and discuss John Goldsmith’s recent paper in Phonology 25.1 (”Generative phonology in the late 1940s“, doi:10.1017/S0952675708001395). I’m not really sure what’s the best way to go about this, so I’ll just suggest the following: anyone interested can pick a point of discussion and write a post about it, and anyone interested in responding to that point can comment specifically on that post.

OK, now that I’ve written that out, that just sounds like plain old blogging. I guess what I’m trying to suggest is that we don’t limit the discussion to just one post and its associated comments: if the point of discussion that you want to pick is sufficiently different from what’s already been posted, then I encourage you to start a new post rather than to comment on the old one. We can maybe tie all the threads together later.

OK, that still just sounds like plain old blogging. Forget I ever said anything. Let’s just move on to my (first?) suggested point of discussion, focusing on §2 of the paper (pp. 40-42 of the published version, pp. 4-6 of the preprint).

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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Acoustics Week in Canada

Acoustics Week in Canada 2008, the annual conference of the Canadian Acoustical Association, will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia from 6 to 8 October 2008. This is the premier Canadian acoustical event of the year, and is being held in beautiful, vibrant Vancouver, making it an event that you do not want to miss. The conference will include three days of plenary lectures, technical sessions on a wide range of areas of acoustics, the CAA Annual General Meeting, an equipment exhibition, and the conference banquet and other social events.

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In my last post I mentioned wanting to read the following paper just published in Phonology:

Generative phonology in the late 1940s (pp 37 - 59)
John A. Goldsmith
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001395

I’ve now read it, and I’d like to suggest that the two or three people who might be reading these words read it, too, so we can have a little online discussion about it. If you don’t have access to the journal, you can find a pre-print here (a quick skim reveals it to be about 95% identical in content to the published version). You might also want to heed the encouragement that Goldsmith offers in the next-to-last paragraph:

Needless to say, I encourage the reader to read Wells’ paper for himself, and to judge whether it is not a cautious and careful exegesis of the benefits that can be reaped from derivational analysis, aimed at an audience that was leery of confusing synchronic and diachronic analysis. As a phonologist working at the beginning of the 21st century, I would argue that we should not characterise the work of linguists such as Wells, Harris and Hockett as the last gasp of a dying structuralism, but as a body of scholarship out of which generative phonology was a natural development.
Surely this conclusion is reasonable and, ultimately, not at all surprising. My admiration for generative phonology is in no way diminished by the realisation that its key ideas were being considered and developed by the mid 1940s. It is, after all, the ideas that matter to us now.

(And if that JSTOR link doesn’t work for ya, try this.)

OK, we’ll reconvene sometime next week. I’ll plan to start, but if anyone feels like chiming in before I do, please feel free.

The latest (online) issue (Vol. 25, Iss. 1) has just been announced, and here’s the TOC + abstracts. Truth be told, I’m a history-of-the-field buff and so I’m looking forward to reading Goldsmith’s article.

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For most phonologists, the process of Final Devoicing, which we can observe in languages such as German, Dutch, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Catalan and Turkish, did not deserve a lot of attention. One would write a rule of approximately the shape [-son] → [-voice] / __ #/$, and declare the issue resolved.

However, recent years have seen a revived interest in phenomena surrounding devoicing, for a variety of reasons. One of them are developments in the formalism, like that of OT. For one thing, it appears much easier to view devoicing as a rule than as the result of a constraint. There is no consensus yet as to what the constraint should be in OT (e.g. a general constraint against voicing *Voiced, dominated by a faithfulness constraint for onsets, a conjunction of NoCoda with *Voiced, a positional markedness constraint, etc.) and further, Final Devoicing is one of the most famous cases of the so-called Too-Many-Solutions Problem: why would the relevant constraint always be satisfied by deletion of the voicing feature?

Further, lots of empirical work has come out which does not fit very easily with classical views of phonology (including most of OT). First, we find final devoicing both in languages in which the relevant contrast is indeed [voice] (such as Catalan), but also in languages in which it rather involves [spread glottis] (like German), which raises the question what these phenomena have in common from a phonological point of view. Secondly, there is a large body of work showing that final devoicing in many cases is not neutralizing completely, but that there are phonetic traces of voicing in the acoustic signal, and that listeners to some extent can detect these traces at least in experimental circumstances. Thirdly, it turns out that whether or not a given stem is subject to final devoicing is to a large extent predictable given lexical statistics.

Finally, it has become clear over the years that devoicing interacts with many other phonological processes in (varieties of) European languages, such as voicing assimilation, but also lexical tone. It has been claimed as well that certain dialects of French, for instance, have developed interesting phonological phenomena as a result of contact with West-Germanic final devoicing systems.

What is the place of devoicing and other voicing phenomena in phonological theory? Which phenomena need to be accounted for by our theory? Which phenomena CAN be understood by it? This will be the topic of a workshop at the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam on September 11, 2008, and the University of Leiden on September 12, 2008. The workshop will end in a very big party. Participation (including the party) is free for all readers of Phonoloblog. Invited speakers will be Harry van der Hulst (University of Connecticut) and Ben Hermans (Meertens Instituut).

Please submit an abstract (2 pages max; does not need to be anonymous; pdf file) to Marc.van.Oostendorp@Meertens.KNAW.nl. Deadline: June 28.

There are a few things that Eric and I disagree on, one of them being the merits of Rush–I mean, seriously Eric, how can you listen to that crap. Another thing we disagree on appears to be whether it’s OK to argue phonology anonymously on the internets. In the Opacity Kerfluffle chez Mr. Verb, Eric got miffed at Cassaday whatshisorhername for not coming out of the shadows:

I was apparently inappropriately offended at Cassaday’s combination of willingness to be just as nasty as I was and unwillingness to be identified.

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