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

I’m sad to report that Nick Clements passed away in Chatham, Massachusetts, on August 30, just over a month shy of his 69th birthday (according to his Wikipedia entry). Beth Hume wrote an obituary for him on LINGUIST List, which I reproduce in full further below. Beth co-organized a symposium on tones and features in honor of Nick in June; the speaker list was a veritable who’s who of phonology, of which Nick was also of course a prominent member. He will be missed.

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When and where: University of Alberta, Edmonton, February 13-14, 2010.  Robert Kirchner and Anne-Michelle Tessier, organizers

Theme: Major advances have been made in recent years towards explicit  modelling of phonological acquisition, including increasingly  sophisticated OT learning algorithms, as well as application of general machine learning techniques (e.g. expectation maximization and maximum entropy learning). At the same time, evidence of token and type frequency sensitivity in the propagation of both categorical and gradient patterns in speech has spurred growing interest in exemplar-based models of acquisition and processing.  This workshop aims to bring together these two strands of research, promoting dialogue between those pursuing symbolic and subsymbolic approaches to acquisition of the sound patterns of spoken language. We invite oral and poster presentations from phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, computational linguists, and speech scientists on this general theme.  Though relevant analytic, programmatic, or experimental presentations are also welcome, priority will be given to abstracts reflecting original computational modelling results for some aspect of phonological/phonetic acquisition.

Invited speakers will include: Adam Albright (MIT), Michael Becker (Harvard), Andries Coetzee (Michigan), Robert Daland (UCLA), Bruce Hayes (UCLA), Jeff Mielke (Ottawa), Ben Munson (Minnesota), James Myers (CCU, Taiwan), Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern), Alan Yu (Chicago).  Titles to be announced.

Funding: The organizers anticipate sufficient funding to cover travel and accommodation costs of all presenters whose abstracts are accepted, above and beyond the invited speakers.

Submission: Abstracts for oral or poster presentations should be no longer than one page (US letter or A4, 11 pt, 1 inch margins) with a second page for references, data and/or figures. Abstracts should be emailed as a PDF attachment to

phonmod@ualberta.ca, deadline: midnight (Mountain Time), November 20, 2009.

Unless the submitter indicates otherwise, the organizers will consider each abstract’s suitability for oral or poster presentation. Authors should include the title, name(s), and affiliation(s) in the body of the email.

This item = Kiparsky’s Explanation in Phonology.

I’m hoping to get feedback about your experiences or advice regarding using Kager’s OT textbook, along with McCarthy’s Doing OT. Some background about the course I’m planning for: it’s a grad course that follows up a data-analysis and argumentation course in which we used Understanding Phonology (2nd ed., Gussenhoven and Jacobs), and didn’t really get into OT, which we’ll be doing this semester. I’ve used the Kager text before, and am planning to go through a chapter a week, then move on to articles that apply OT to various subfields of particular interest to our students (variation, change, acquisition, contact), and students will do problem sets at first, along with article reviews and then a final research project. I’ve never used Doing OT, and so wonder about your all’s experience with it, if you’ve ever used it in conjunction with the Kager text (interleaved, one after the other, ?). Any other input, advice, etc. would be much appreciated!

I just discovered this amazing online script for LaTeX users that converts your hand-drawn symbol into the appropriate LaTeX command (it also tells you which package you need to load to have access to the command, which for many people, may be the more useful function). The character recognition is very accurate in most cases, especially for math symbols, but of course, the more training it receives, the better the results will be.

It’s clear that the IPA symbols haven’t been trained very much yet. I’ve already noticed improvement just from my own limited training on ɒ, which wasn’t on the short list at all the first time I tried it, and now frequently appears as the number one choice after a few trainings. So pick your favorite IPA symbols and get to work!

Ultrafest V will be held March 19-21, 2010, at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. Deadline for abstracts is September 10, 2009. (Hard to believe there’s already been IV others, isn’t it?)

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

The good folks at CUNY Phonology Forum continue their climb up the prosodic hierarchy with their latest effort, the Conference on the Word in Phonology, to be held January 14-16, 2010, at the CUNY Graduate Center. The deadline for abstracts is October 18, 2009.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

The seventh Old World Conference on Phonology will be held in Nice, France, in late January 2010, with a thematic pre-conference workshop on Templates and phonological theory. The deadline for abstracts is September 15, 2009.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Special issue on Phonological models and experimental data, co-edited by Coetzee, Kager, and Pater. See the TOC here.

In case you hadn’t heard, NELS 40 will take place at MIT, November 12-15, 2009. They kinda took this over at the last minute so things are progressing a little more slowly than usual, but they’ve just announced one of their two planned workshops: Phonological Similarity: Perceptual and Articulatory Bases and Links to Grammatical Mechanisms. Abstract deadline: August 21, 2009.