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The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology

B. Elan Dresher

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics No. 121

‘Contrast’ — the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language — is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents an original account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.

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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

‘Mao Kong Forum’ is established by the Mao Kong Graduate Student Phonology Group at the National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei. It will begin with a phonology conference this year. The conference is open to a wide range of submissions by international graduate students.

Theme: Modern phonology (theoretical or experimental)
Organized by: Mao Kong Graduate Student Phonology Group, NCCU
Venue: Conference Room 2 and 5, 7th Floor, Administration Building, NCCU
Language: Chinese and English

Keynote Speakers:
Wang, H. Samuel (Department of Foreign Language and Applied Linguistics, Yuan Ze University)
Huang, Hui-Chuan (Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University)

Invited Speakers:
Lin, Hui-Shan (Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University)
Wee, Lian-Hee (Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University)

1. Please email the abstract together with the submission form to MPC committee by October 1, 2009 (Thursday).
2. Please do not include author information in the abstract.

Notification of Acceptance: November 9, 2009 (Monday)

Please download the submission form here. For further information, please visit the following URL: http://www.wretch.cc/blog/mpcnccu.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

This workshop brings together phonologists from the University of Toronto, the University of Tromsø, and some from elsewhere with related interests.

Talks focus on the acquisition and analysis of contrast, markedness, laryngeal phonology, harmony, and the nature of features. Interested persons are welcome to attend, but please notify our contact person.

LARP at BYU (Provo, UT), Sept. 23-25, 2010.

Abstract submission deadline: Feb. 28, 2010.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

[ Via the UCLA Linguistics Department Newsletter. ]

At the time of his death, the late Professor Peter Ladefoged was engaged in an NSF-supported project to digitize and post online many recordings from the Phonetics Lab’s archives. In 2006, Professor Russ Schuh stepped in to see the project to completion. The UCLA Phonetics Archive, now on line, mostly comprises field recordings by Ladefoged and others, but also includes some recordings made for undergraduate term papers. Over the course of the project, many recent UCLA Linguistics undergraduates worked to digitize the audio recordings and accompanying wordlists. These are not teaching materials (not like http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/), but rather raw unedited recordings, which are primarily intended for use by researchers (though they are also great fun to browse). Nonetheless, the Archive provided excellent materials for class assignments in acoustic analysis for Linguistics 104 [at UCLA] in Fall 2007 and 2008. In November 2008, near the end of the project, [the LA-area public] radio station KPCC ran a story about the Archive.

[ From Steve Parker, via LINGUIST List. ]

I am looking for input (data) on tautosyllabic consonant clusters. Suppose that a syllable begins with two adjacent consonants, followed by a vowel: CCV. Technically this is called an initial demisyllable. I am aware of two competing claims/proposals about what kinds of consonants are cross-linguistically unmarked or preferred in this type of situation, both based on the notion of relative sonority. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume a common five-way sonority scale:

V (vowel)
G (glide)
L (liquid)
N (nasal)
O (obstruent)
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Almost exactly three years ago, I announced a plan on Phonoloblog: the plan to establish a Wiki for OT constraints, which should slowly grow into a large online reference on all constraints which have been proposed in the literature. The plan was born during a conversation with Curt Rice during the legendary Bloomington PhonologyFest of 2006.

The advantages of a ConCat are evident. It’s useful to have a tool where you can look up what has been written about a certain constraint, how it has been defined, which constraints are related to it, and whether some constraint has already been proposed in a different form or with a different name. Eventually, it could be a tool in the development of a true theory of possible OT constraints.

We established a website for ConCat in 2006, but it didn’t really grow since then. Maybe it was too small to be really attractive as a tool to use. This summer, however, I was fortunate enough to find two enthusiastic students from the University of the Aegean in Greece (Anna Fragkiadaki and Sofia Kousi) who filled the database with over 340 constraints, mostly excerpted from the handbooks by Kager and McCarthy, but also many other books and papers from the literature of the past 15 years.

I hope that in this way ConCat is becoming more useful. I hope you will see how useful it is, and that you start contributing.

OCP 7 abstract deadline Sept. 15 (despite what it says on LINGUIST List), Ultrafest V abstract deadline Sept. 10.

Beckman, Jessen, and Ringen on German fricative devoicing; Flack on onsets and codas of words and phrases; Heinz on learning stress patterns; Kochetov reviews Phonetically-based phonology; Ussishkin reviews Canonical forms in prosodic morphology. TOC here.

In the before time, in the long long ago, I had a little tête-à-tête(-à-bête-noire) about phonological opacity with Mr. Verb and friends — you can follow along (again, or for the first time) here, then here, then here and here and here and here, then back here, and finally ending here (and don’t forget to squeeze the comments).

I got very hot under the collar about various things during that discussion, so much so that the focus of the discussion kinda shifted to my frustration with anonymous commenters on the internets (even my good friend Ed played for the other team on that one). But there was just one thing I was really upset about: the apparent inability of many fans of rule ordering to say anything about the fact that blocking is an instance of opacity about which rule ordering has nothing to say. (I used nonderived environment blocking as an example, but any other forms of blocking work.) The curse of the true believer is an unwillingness or inability to question the claims of the belief system, and the relevant claim in this case is “rule ordering explains opacity”.

Well, I’ve just finished a paper (for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Phonology) that sets out the issues (as I see them, of course) in a more academic, less hot-headed format, and I’ve posted it here. I hope that it generates some discussion here, either in the comments below, in new posts, or even over on Mr. Verb’s blog.