Introductory Phonology

Bruce Hayes

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

Accessible, succinct, and including numerous student-friendly features, this introductory textbook offers an exceptional foundation to the field for those who are coming to it for the first time.

• Provides an ideal first course book in phonology, written by a renowned phonologist
• Developed and tested in the classroom through years of experience and use
• Emphasizes analysis of phonological data, placing this in its scientific context, and explains the relevant methodology
• Guides students through the larger questions of what phonological patterns reveal about language
• Includes numerous course-friendly features, including multi-part exercises and annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter

Introduction to Natural Phonology

July 6-10, 2009
Porto, Portugal
João Veloso

This course will be an introduction to the main ideas of Natural Phonology, a theory first proposed by David Stampe (1969, 1979), and later developed by Stampe and Donegan (1978, 1979, 1983, 2004) and Donegan (1993, 1995, 1996, etc.). Reference will be made, whenever appropriate, to other followers of the theory, like Churma, Dressler, Dziubalska, Hurch, Nathan, Rhodes, and Wojcik.

Each day will consist of a theoretical presentation, followed by practical exercises of phonological analysis. Basque will be the first source of empirical data, but English, French and Spanish will also be considered (apart from occasional examples from other languages). Such analysis will then be applied to topics of Portuguese phonology selected by students and studied in class together with the instructor of the course.

Reading material and texts for discussion will be provided whenever necessary.

Price and application. Students: 30 euros; Others: 60 euros

1st Day- The Living Sound Pattern of Language
Introduction to Natural Phonology
Workshop Subject: What a Phonological Process Is

2nd Day- Language Acquisition as Process Suppression
Some Thoughts on Bilingual Acquisition
Workshop Subject: The Analysis of Fortitions and Lenitions

3rd Day - The Phoneme
Paradigmatic Processes, the Phonetic Motivation Of
Phoneme Inventories (E.G. The Vowel System of Basque, Spanish, French, or Portuguese)
Workshop Subject: Allophonic and Phonemic Substitutions

4th Day - Phonostylistic and Other Non-Obligatory Substitutions
When Phonetics Is Not the Issue: Morpho(no)logy
Workshop Subject: Processes vs. Rules

5th Day- Prosody as the Main Factor
Prosodic Processes. Morphoprosody.
Workshop Subject: Basque, Portuguese, Spanish from the Point of View of a Holistic Typology

Tones and Features: A Symposium in Honor of G. Nick Clements

June 18-19, 2009
Paris, France

A symposium will be held to honor the many contributions of Nick Clements to the field of linguistics.

The two-day event will feature presentations by (preliminary list):

François Dell
Grzegorz Dogil
John Goldsmith & Fidèle Mpiranya
Morris Halle
Pierre Hallé
Bruce Hayes
Elizabeth Hume & Jeff Mielke
Larry Hyman
Samuel Jay Keyser & Kenneth Stevens
Hyunsoon Kim, Kiyoshi Honda & Shinji Maeda
Charles Kisseberth
Aditi Lahiri
Joan Mascaró
John McCarthy
David Odden
Annie Rialland
R. Ridouane
Donca Steriade
Jerzy Rubach
Leo Wetzels

Seating is limited in the presentation hall. Therefore, all those wishing to attend must reserve a spot in advance, on a first-come first-served basis. Please send your request to GNCsymposium@ling.osu.edu. Additional information will be sent to attendees at a later date.

Organizers:
John Goldsmith (University of Chicago)
Beth Hume (The Ohio State University)
Leo Wetzels (CNRS, Paris; VU University Amsterdam)

Here’s the quick link to donate:

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

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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.

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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:

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Moderator, LINGUIST

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.)

In a conversation after Yuki’s tribute service last week, I agreed with David Perlmutter (another UCSD emeritus colleague) when he said (something along the lines of) that Yuki’s book made uncommon generative sense of the “deep” morphophonemics of Yokuts. [note] In his remarks during the service, Matthew Chen (yet another UCSD emeritus colleague) had referred to the lasting significance of Yuki’s analysis of Yokuts morphophonemics, in particular the opaque interactions among several of its phonological rules, and he’s also very right about that. Either directly or indirectly via the case study in Kenstowicz & Kisseberth (1979) — aka my favorite textbook — these opaque interactions are the standards against which any alternative to extrinsic rule ordering are typically measured; I have reason to believe that Paul Kiparsky’s perpetually delayed Paradigms and Opacity book devotes several pages to an argument that you can and must handle all of these interactions intrinsically with his favorite three levels: stem, word, phrase. (Nice.)

And of course we can’t forget the ultimate example of opacity, absolute neutralization, the use of which Chuck Kisseberth famously defended with the multiple strands of evidence for long vowel lowering in Yokuts, or Kisseberth’s other well-known work laying out the evidence for a “conspiracy” in Yokuts among several rules that appear to respond (via blocking or triggering) to the same restrictions on consonant clustering, later understood in terms of syllable structure. I’ve been using Kisseberth (1970) as a lead-in to the material of my first-year graduate phonology course for some time now, and noticed that John McCarthy uses the relevant set of facts to illustrate how to do OT in his Doing Optimality Theory.

It’s all there, in Yokuts. This all made me think back to a crazy idea I had, not too long ago, to teach an introductory phonology class with Yuki’s book as a text. Or a graduate seminar where we’d read Newman’s grammar, Yuki’s book, Kisseberth’s dissertation and other work, the relevant chunks of Kenstowicz & Kisseberth (1979), etc., then move into the 1980s with Archangeli’s stuff, and on into OT and the promises of conspiracies and the problems of opacity. More of a historical course, I suppose, but all the stuff I like about phonological theory kind of guiding you through that history. Cool. Maybe someday — or, maybe that’d make a good book? Hmm.

Well, I missed my chance to write about Yokuts in my recent paper on abstractness, but you can be reasonably sure that I won’t miss it again in my paper-in-preparation on opacity (which I am very, very late with, so I guess I’d better go).

Note. — As Yuki pointed out in his preface, his analysis was “a reformulation of Professor Stanley Newman’s description of the Yawelmani language in terms of generative phonology”: the relevant data had already been described and made somewhat different sense of by Newman in his 1944 Yokuts language of California (Viking Fund publications in anthropology No. 2, Viking Fund, New York; reprinted 1963 & 1968, Johnson Reprint Corp., New York). [back]

Session at the 40th Poznan Linguistic Meeting. 2-5 September. Gniezno, Poland.

Traditionally, melodic primitives are linked with structural positions, with the implication that melody specifies phonetic properties such as voicing or place of articulation, whereas the structural positions themselves are devoid of phonetic content. This distinction between melody and structure appears to be widely accepted, even among ‘phonetically based’ approaches to phonology. For example, Steriade (1997) presents a cue-based account of laryngeal neutralizations in various languages, which is presented largely as a refutation of a ‘licensing by prosody’ (e.g. Ito 1986) approach that relates the presence or absence of laryngeal contrasts to questions of syllable structure. Recent proposals in element theory (Jensen 1994, Pochtrager 2006) replace melodic properties with structural configurations, but nevertheless assume that melody and structure are different representational species.

This session seeks to examine the underlying assumption of a melody/structure dichotomy. We are particularly interested in the following questions. Are ‘licensing by cue’ and ‘licensing by prosody’ mutually exclusive. Can we really separate melody and structure? If not, how do melody and structure interact? Is structure really phonetically bare? If not, what defines it?

In keeping with the leitmotif for this year’s PLM (”Variants, Variation, Variability”), we especially welcome papers comparing a variety of approaches to the melody/structure problem, or those investigating representational implications of cross-linguistic variation.

You may upload your abstracts (no more than two pages including examples and references) at the PLM website. Please also send a copy of your abstract to session organizer Geoff Schwartz. The deadline for submission is May 1st.

Hope to see you.

Charles (Chuck) Kisseberth occupies a unique position in phonology (comparable to the late Ken Hale’s in syntax). He has conducted trailblazing research at both the theoretical and descriptive levels, treating the two as different aspects of the same grand enterprise. His many papers and books over his 40 year career are commonly regarded as masterpieces of phonological analysis with mountains of data to support each step of the argument. Many of the most intriguing data sets that have continued to occupy our field’s attention were either originally discovered by or brought to our general attention by Chuck: Yawelmani vowels and syllable structure, Klamath global rules, Tonkawa derivational constraints, Chimwini sentential phonology, Bantu migrating tones. His early work on rule ordering, conspiracies, and derivational constraints diagnosed serious problems with the strictly bottom-up, derivational model of classical generative phonology. This fundamental insight was given its proper due only some 25 years later with the development of Optimality Theory. Chuck has been an active contributor to the OT literature with his Optimal Domains model of autosegmental phonology (in collaboration with Jennifer Cole and Farida Cassimjee). Chuck has been equally successful as a teacher and mentor. He has directed over forty doctoral dissertations — many by native speaker linguists describing their languages for the first time. Our 1979 textbook Generative Phonology: Description and Theory was the table at which a whole generation of linguists were served their first taste of phonology. We hope that the studies presented here provide him some recompense for his inspiration, guidance, and friendship over the years.

The TOC is below the fold; if you have access, check out the issue itself here.

Data and Theory: Papers in Phonology in Celebration of Charles W. Kisseberth

1. Editor’s preface
Page 113
Michael J. Kenstowicz

2. Publications of Charles W. Kisseberth
Pages 114-116

3. Harmonic domains and synchronization in typically and atypically developing
Hebrew-speaking children
Pages 117-135
Outi Bat-El

4. Colloquial Hebrew imperatives revisited
Pages 136-143
Shmuel Bolozky

5. Emergent feature structures: harmony systems in exemplar models of phonology
Pages 144-160
Jennifer Cole

6. Tone and depression in Phuthi
Pages 161-178
Simon Donnelly

7. On pitch lowering not linked to voicing: Nguni and Shona group depressors
Pages 179-198
Laura J. Downing

8. Unstressed words in Spanish
Pages 199-212
José Ignacio Hualde

9. How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent
Pages 213-238
Larry M. Hyman

10. Tone and syntax in Rutooro, a toneless Bantu language of Western Uganda
Pages 239-247
Shigeki Kaji

11. Two notes on Kinande vowel harmony
Pages 248-270
Michael J. Kenstowicz

12. Size vis-à-vis frequency: minimality and maximality constraints in Swahili
Pages 271-284
Iwona Kraska-Szlenk

13. Conspiracy and sabotage in the acquisition of phonology: dense data
undermine existing theories, provide scaffolding for a new one
Pages 285-304
Lise Menn, Ellen Schmidt, Brent Nicholas

14. Tachoni verbal tonology
Pages 305-324
David Odden

15. Productive reduplication in a fundamentally monosyllabic language
Pages 325-342
Ronnie B. Wilbur

Organized by Rob Goedemans, Jeroen van de Weijer and Marc van Oostendorp (Leiden University)

April 2, 2009; Leiden University, Lipsius Building (http://www.visitors.leiden.edu/lipsius.jsp), room 235c

14.00 - 16:00 Harry van der Hulst (University of Connecticut): A new theory of word accentual structures (abstract below)
16:00 - Comments by Marc van Oostendorp and Jeroen van de Weijer, followed by discussion

Participation in this seminar is free for all. If possible, please announce your intention to come with Marc.van.Oostendorp@Meertens.KNAW.nl

A New Theory of Word Accentual Structures
Harry van der Hulst
University of Connecticut

The key insight of standard metrical theory (Liberman and Prince 1977, Vergnaud and Halle 1978, Hayes 1980, Halle and Vergnaud 1987, Idsardi 1990) is that syllables (or perhaps subsyllabic constituents such as skeletal positions, rhymes or moras) of words are organized into a layer of foot structure, each foot having a head. Primary accent is then derived by organizing the feet into a word structure in which one foot is the head. The head of the head foot, being a head at both levels, expresses primary accent. In this view, rhythmic accents are assigned first, while primary accent is regarded as the promotion of one of these rhythmic accents. In this seminar, I defend a different
formal theory of word accent. The theory is non-metrical in that the account of primary accent location is not based on iterative foot structure. The theory separates the representation of primary and rhythmic accents, the idea being that the latter are accounted for with reference to the primary accent location. This means that rhythmic structure is either assigned later (in a derivational sense),
or governed by constraints that are subordinate to the constraints that govern primary accent (as is possible in the approach presented in Prince and Smolensky 1993). The present approach has been called ‘a primary-accent first theory’ (see van der Hulst 1984, 1990, 1992, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000a, 2002, 2009, van der Hulst and Kooij 1994, van der Hulst and Lahiri 1988 for earlier statements; see web page below for these and other references). I will demonstrate the workings of the theory using a variety of examples from bounded and unbounded (weight-sensitive and insensitive systems) taken from the StressTyp database developed by Rob Goedemans and Van der Hulst (http://stresstyp-test.leidenuniv.nl/).

Phonology Volume 25 - Issue 03 - December 2008
(Author URLs included when I could easily find them.)

Research Articles

Why labial-velar stops merge to /gb/ (pp 379 - 398)
Michael C. Cahill
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001541

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation (pp 399 - 431)
Alexei Kochetov and Marianne Pouplier
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001553

Prevocalic faithfulness (pp 433 - 468)
Jerzy Rubach
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001589

The calling contour in Hungarian and English (pp 469 - 497)
László Varga
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001607

An articulatory view of Kinyarwanda coronal harmony (pp 499 - 535)
Rachel Walker, Dani Byrd, and Fidèle Mpiranya
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001619

Book Reviews

Sharon Inkelas and Cheryl Zoll (2005). Reduplication: doubling in morphology. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xxii+254. (pp 537 - 545)
Suzanne Urbanczyk
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001590

Sharon Hargus (2007). Witsuwit’en grammar: phonetics, phonology, morphology. (First Nations Languages Series.) Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press. Pp. xv+837. (pp 546 - 553)
Keren Rice
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001577

Edmund Gussmann (2007). The phonology of Polish. (The Phonology of the World’s Languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiii+367. (pp 554 - 556)
Anna Łubowicz
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001565

Notes for contributors (pp 559 - 562)
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001644