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

I installed Windows 7 (RS) a couple of weeks ago and noticed that Microsoft’s default fonts for body text and headings –Calibri and Cambria, respectively– have been upgraded to include phonetic symbols and allow diacritic stacking. As far as I can tell, they’re now as IPA-friendly as Times New Roman (cf. earlier post) and perhaps better: in Powerpoint, where Calibri is the default, both superscripts and subscripts finally stack nicely (unlike with Times New Roman).

Unlike phonoloblog, the LINGUIST List has a staff of students who require funding to keep list going. Please consider contributing a little something during their current fund drive. The message from Anthony Aristar copied below clarifies. Since this message was sent out a few days ago, the fund drive has gotten around $20,000 closer to their goal of $60,000. But more is still needed!

Here’s the quick link to donate:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Dear Listowners:

As you know, the LINGUIST List provides you with Listserv facilities without any charge. We do this because we feel that it is important that there be no barriers to the free interchange of information between those interested in language and linguistics, and we know that many of you have no access to good Listserv software, or to any place to archive their postings. We’re genuinely happy to help with this.

However, as you also probably know, running the LINGUIST site, with its servers and expensive software — four Unix servers, five Oracle databases, Coldfusion server, Listserv, map server and Java and PHP servers — is not cheap. The only way we can provide these services free is to do what we do now, and have an annual fund drive.

This has been a bad year for everyone and everything… And our fund drive is no exception. We are only halfway to our goal of $60,000, and the fund drive has been running for almost three weeks. Frankly, we are getting worried… So we’re writing this message to ask if you would be generous enough to send a call to your members — if you haven’t done this already — asking them to contribute to our drive, so that the services we have been providing, for free, we can continue to provide… for free.

You know that we send you messages like this very rarely. We don’t want to bother you. And we’d like to emphasize that there is no obligation on your part to do as we are asking. This is entirely voluntary.

But if you would be willing to help us, and ask your list-members to contribute, we’d be very grateful. Our donation page is:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Thank you very much!

Anthony Aristar
Moderator, LINGUIST

I’m pretty sure that the readership of this blog (all 2 of you) is a proper subset of the readership of Language Log, but just in case you were absent one of these two days, my UCSD emeritus colleague Yuki Kuroda passed away late last month. I’ve since spent a little time (with several other folks in my department) working on a website for Yuki, with his obituary, a comprehensive bibliography, many remembrances, and more.

And I’ve also spent time thinking about Yuki’s classic 1967 contribution to phonological theory, Yawelmani Phonology. (Click the link — it’s a new $20 MIT Press Classics Series edition.) The Yawelmani variety of Yokuts is now more commonly/correctly referred to as Yowulmne; since neither name can be found in the Ethnologue, I will henceforth refer to it as Yokuts. (Plus, I think that looks and sounds cooler next to Yuki’s name in the title of this post.)

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Hello, this is basically avoidance behavior, but I thought some of you might like to know…

“Tatamagouche” is a small town in Nova Scotia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatamagouche,_Nova_Scotia). The similar “Tatamagouchi” appears in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968, 114) as an example word, as part of the data justifying a phonological rule that assigns secondary stress in long words.

A Google search on “Tatamagouchi” yields mostly works in phonological theory addressing English stress assignment. I conjecture, therefore, that Chomsky and Halle made a spelling mistake in SPE (or used an archaic spelling) which has since been carried forward by other phonologists, myself included. Cheers, Bruce Hayes

A sad coincidence, given reading group material:

Rulon S. Wells III, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Philosophy at Yale University, died on May 3, 2008 in Salt Lake City at the age of 90.

(Quoted from this LINGUIST List obituary.)

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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I’m clearly not above fighting on the internets, even with folks who choose not to reveal their true identities while making flippant remarks about the vices and virtues of competing theoretical frameworks. I’m referring, of course, to the discussion with Mr. Verb & friends that I initiated here, with the remainder of the discussion on Mr. Verb’s blog (follow the links in the comments section of my post).

In the fourth part of his response, Mr. Verb correctly points out that I started the nastiness with this remark (emphasis added to the quoted “quip”):

In my view, it requires a lot of (willful) ignorance of a huge amount of important work in the 70s and 80s to think that OT doesn’t make significant progress in many areas (duplication, conspiracies, top-down and bottom-up effects, the emergence of the unmarked, …) where SPE essentially foundered.

And I’m the first to admit that I continued in the same nasty vein in the comments sections of Mr. Verb’s responses to my four challenges, with particular vitriol reserved for a certain “Cassaday Rassmussen” (who is doubtless an extraordinarily cute though cheeky little devil, much like the sea otters s/he loves so much). I was apparently inappropriately offended at Cassaday’s combination of willingness to be just as nasty as I was and unwillingness to be identified. (I am somehow less offended by Mr. Verb’s anonymity, given the clues he leaves here and there that help to narrow the field of possibilities down considerably.)

ANYWAY, now that Mr. Verb’s multi-part response to my multi-part challenge is over (save for an appendix that promises to tie up some loose ends), I figured it was an appropriate time to summarize some of my thoughts on the matter and the episode, beyond making rabid remarks in the comments area of an anonymous blog. Read on (and comment, anonymously or not!) if you’re interested, navigate away (to youtube, for example) if you’re not.

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IULC Publications is pleased to announce the release of the 6th volume in its working papers series titled “Phonological Opacity Effects in Optimality Theory”, edited by Ashley W. Farris-Trimble and Daniel A. Dinnsen. This working papers series highlights the work of graduate students, faculty, and alumni of Indiana University. Information on ordering and the table of contents for this volume can be found at the IULC Publications website http://www.iub.edu/~iulc. A number of other phonology-specific titles can also be found.

It has struck me over the past couple of weeks that the way news readers pronounce the ‘new’ name of Burma says something about English vowel phonemes. Most of them are incapable of pronouncing Myanmar with an initial nasal+glide (as I believe it’s supposed to be pronounced: Wikipedia entry). Instead what we hear is generally something along the lines of

̀[ˈmiɑnˌmɑɚ]

Presumably, if the /ju/ sequence in English in words like ‘mute’ were biphonemic (as in, say, the Trager-Smith phonemicization), the /j/ would be freely combinable and /mja-/ would be easy. But it’s not. So we could guess that /ju/ is a unit phoneme (similar to /aɪ/, or even /u(w)/ and the palatal glide is an integral part of the phoneme and thus not separable to be combined with any random vowel that another language might need.
Anyway, just a random thought I wanted to post somewhere while the news was still current.

I don’t read Mr. Verb regularly, but I really should. On occasion, he’ll slip into a “moment of theoretical linguistic seriousness” of the kind that we (well, I) attempt to maintain consistently here at phonoloblog (ahem). Case in point: a post from a couple months ago on phonological opacity, following up on a reader’s questions about something mentioned in passing in this post. (Hat-tip to Ed.) The post on opacity concludes:

In any monostratal theory (one without stages of derivation), getting these interactions is a huge problem. This isn’t the place to run through them, but some readers will be familiar with sympathy theory, comparative markedness, and so on. I heard one person sum it up this way a few years ago:

Opacity is ubiquitous in human language, and earlier theories of phonology could deal with it easily. It’s hard to see why those advantages have been abandoned for an approach that can’t handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all, for benefits that don’t look all that great.

(I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to assume that “earlier theories of phonology” refers to serial, rule-based generative phonology in the SPE-and-subsequent-developments sense, and that “any monostratal theory (one without stages of derivation)” and “an approach that can’t handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all” refers to Optimality Theory. Correct me if I’m wrong.)

I’m not going to contest the ubiquitousness of opacity in human language claim, having recently written an article assuming this to be true (appeared in Phonology 24.2, 217-259). I’ll also assume that we can all agree on the legitimacy of at least some examples of opacity, in the sense that we agree that such cases involve the interaction of synchronic phonological processes (pace Sanders on ’synchronic’ and Green on ‘phonological’). But I would like to challenge Mr. Verb (and the quoted summer-upper) to defend (some of) the remaining claims, explicit and implicit, made in what I’ve quoted above. Here is a list of what I take those claims to be.

1. OT is by definition monostratal.
2. OT requires “lots of gymnastics” to account for opacity, while SPE doesn’t.
3. SPE(-and-subsequent-developments) “could deal with [opacity] easily”.
4. The benefits of OT over SPE “don’t look all that great”.

More commentary on each of these below the fold.

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