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

The OCP 7 program, with clickable abstracts, is up. Lucky are those who will be in Nice in January.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

The 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology,
to be held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, USA.

Dates of conference: 8-10 July 2010
Theme: Gesture as Language, Gesture and Language.
More information at conference website http://www.unm.edu/~labfon12/

Deadline for abstract submission: 20 November 2009
Notification of acceptance: 1 February 2010

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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

GLOW Workshop on Phonology and Phonetics
Positional Phenomena in Phonology and Phonetics
(Organised by Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)

Date: 13 April 2010
Organisers: Marzena Zygis, Stefanie Jannedy, Susanne Fuchs

Invited Speakers:
Taehong Cho (Hanyang University, Seoul) confirmed
Grzegorz Dogil (University of Stuttgart) confirmed

Venue: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, ul. Kuznicza 22, 50-138 Wroclaw

Abstracts due November 1, 2009.

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