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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Dear colleague,

We would like to invite you to the 10th National Congress / 4th International Congress of Phonetics and Phonology, which will take place during the period of November 24 - 26 (2008), at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).

This event is sponsored by the Brazilian Society of Phonetics and it counts with the support of several national and international phoneticians and phonologists.

The general theme of the congress is ”Phonetics and Phonology: Theory and Application”, but we also expect the following sub-themes: (1) Phonetics and Phonology within current theoretical perspectives; (2) Phonetics and Phonology in teaching: Literacy and the teaching of foreign languages; (3) Phonetics and Phonology in linguistic research: Prosody, description of languages, and diachronic phonetic and phonological processes; (4) Interdisciplinary Phonetics and Phonology: Speech pathology and speech synthesis and recognition; and (5) Experimental Phonetics: Current research.

We hope you will be able to participate and/or publicize this event to colleagues and students. For more information: (1) visit the site of the Brazilian Society of Phonetics; (2) e-mail mtmatta@terra.com.br; (3) or phone 21-2522-8881 or 21-9334-5457.

Profª Drª Mirian da Matta Machado
Presidente da SBF

Daniela Isac and Charles Reiss have recently published I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science, which apparently has more phonology in it than your typical textbook of this type. (As the book description notes: “Contains phonological parallels to familiar syntactic arguments”.) There’s also a companion website with various resources, including a great page demonstrating Turkish vowels (previously noted by Mr. Verb). The vowels are arranged in a cube-like format that may be familiar to many of us. (This is the way I learned about Turkish vowels from Jorge Hankamer, and it clearly had a lasting effect on me.)

The publisher’s website also includes this sample chapter (Chapter 1, “What is I-language?” — a good place to start), which begins with an autobiographical story about how Charles used his knowledge of Turkish vowels and vowel harmony to save himself and a friend from a near-death experience (hey, read it yourself).

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Via LINGUIST List (follow the links):

1. Prosodic Alignment at the Word Level
   • Nov. 20-21, 2008
   • Mannheim, Germany
   • This specialized workshop is on alignment, with focus on word-internal morphological and prosodic constituents.
   • Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2008
2. Insertions and Deletions in Speech
   • Mar. 4, 2009
   • Osnabrück, Germany
   • This workshop will provide a forum for phonologists, phoneticians, and morphologists to discuss the forms and functions of deletions and insertions found cross-linguistically, as well as their consequences for phonological systems.
   • Call Deadline: Sept. 1, 2008
3. Rhythm Beyond the Word
   • March 4-6, 2008
   • Osnabrück, Germany
   • The goal of [this workshop] is to bring together researchers who focus on the role of rhythm in various subdomains of linguistics. We invite contributions from scholars working in morphology, phonology and syntax, psycho- and neurolinguistics, aphasiology and language acquisition.
   • Call Deadline: Sept. 1, 2008

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.)

In case you haven’t seen this ad on Linguist List:

The UCLA Department of Linguistics is seeking to fill either a one-year, full-time lecturer position or a series of part-time teaching positions in the area of Phonology for the 2008-2009 academic year.

The one-year, full-time lecturer position would involve teaching 5 courses (over 3 quarters), including two offerings of introductory undergraduate phonology, one of intermediate undergraduate phonology, and two other courses to be negotiated. Salary is approximately $50,000 for the academic year.

If we are unable to fill the one-year lecturer position, we will seek to hire one or more instructors for the following courses: introductory undergraduate phonology (twice: Fall Quarter 2008, Winter Quarter 2009) and intermediate undergraduate phonology (Spring Quarter 2009, could also be taught in Winter). Pay level is approximately $8,000 per course.

Please send applications in electronic form to Prof. Bruce Hayes [to reduce his spam, I’ll ask you to find Bruce’s web page and get his e-mail address from there–the phonologist Bruce Hayes is not to be confused with the one-man band or swimmer of the same name]. Applications should include a cover letter, CV, and whatever information the applicant may wish to include as evidence of a strong teaching record (these may be course evaluation data, course materials, and/or recommendation letters). Please specify whether you are interested in the full-time lecturer position or the part-time position (or both); for the part-time position, please indicate which course(s) and quarter(s).

UCLA is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and has a strong commitment to the achievement of excellence and diversity among its faculty and staff.

A crucial point in Well’s argumentation against static approaches to alternation comes from Latin. Interestingly, his point seems to argue at the same time against rule ordering, although neither Wells nor Goldsmith mention this point.

In Latin, pat-tus becomes passus and met-tus becomes messus. This is very difficult to understand in a ’static’ way (Wells even calls this ‘fatal’, as Goldsmith points out), for instance by only using output constraints. We cannot invoke a constraint *ts and/or a constraint *st, because words such as etsi and este stay unaffected. Only /t/’s which are adjacent to underlying /t/’s turn into [s]. As far as I can see, the only OT mechanism ever proposed which could do this kind of analysis are two-level constraints (which I don’t think anybody is seriously working with).

On the other hand, we can deal with this phenomenon in a ‘dynamic’ way, by positing rules of the following type:

• t->s / _ + t
• t->s / t + _

But we can only do this if we do not order these rules, but let them apply simultaneously. As soon as we order the rules they do not work, or the etsi/este problem arises again. That is the reason why the two-level constraint approach to this is the only one which works as far as I can see: Sympathy, Stratal OT, Comparative Markedness, OT-CC, etc. are all too ‘derivational’.

There also is no clear representational solution (changing a geminate /t/ to a geminate [s], leaving singletons unaffected), since it seems to be a crucial condition that there is a morpheme boundary between the /t/’s.

These thus are very important data, if they are real. Does anybody know about this? Has anybody ever tried to analyze this alternation?

This is a follow up to a quick comment I left in the Reading Group thread. I am not entirely up on the history of the field, so maybe these points are trivial. If so, excuse me.

I found the discussion of rule ordering in section 5 to be interesting. There seem to be a couple of issues that popped up with regard to rule ordering in the 1940s. One is historicity–how seriously are we going to take the time/motion metaphor? Another is the issue of primacy–if a, b, and c are derivable from one source, which one, if any, is primary? And a third is Harris’ claim that extrinsic rule ordering masks natural relationships between classes of derivations.

The first and last issues seem especially interesting after the Mr. Verb Kerfluffle. One of the things that was suggested there was that if you have rules, rule ordering is natural. Goldsmith shows that for some phonologists in the 1940s, rule ordering wasn’t a natural step at all. And it seems to me that a lot of phonology after SPE was concerned with addressing that last bit–making the rule ordering natural (there might be something about the Elsewhere Condition here, but I don’t feel qualified to talk about it).

What put me in mind of the richness of the base (RoB) was the middle part about primacy. RoB is the OT claim that the set of possible inputs to the grammar is universal, thus getting rid of the issue of primacy. In the hypothetical case of a, b, and c the grammar has to make sure that whatever the input /a/, /b/, /c/, etc., nothing maps to b in an environment where b is disallowed. Although RoB doesn’t rule out the use of archiphonemes (or underspecification) it does make them seem unneccesary since you can construct a grammar that will always map a and b to c in the appropriate context for example.

Last week I suggested some of us read and discuss John Goldsmith’s recent paper in Phonology 25.1 (”Generative phonology in the late 1940s“, doi:10.1017/S0952675708001395). I’m not really sure what’s the best way to go about this, so I’ll just suggest the following: anyone interested can pick a point of discussion and write a post about it, and anyone interested in responding to that point can comment specifically on that post.

OK, now that I’ve written that out, that just sounds like plain old blogging. I guess what I’m trying to suggest is that we don’t limit the discussion to just one post and its associated comments: if the point of discussion that you want to pick is sufficiently different from what’s already been posted, then I encourage you to start a new post rather than to comment on the old one. We can maybe tie all the threads together later.

OK, that still just sounds like plain old blogging. Forget I ever said anything. Let’s just move on to my (first?) suggested point of discussion, focusing on §2 of the paper (pp. 40-42 of the published version, pp. 4-6 of the preprint).

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[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Acoustics Week in Canada

Acoustics Week in Canada 2008, the annual conference of the Canadian Acoustical Association, will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia from 6 to 8 October 2008. This is the premier Canadian acoustical event of the year, and is being held in beautiful, vibrant Vancouver, making it an event that you do not want to miss. The conference will include three days of plenary lectures, technical sessions on a wide range of areas of acoustics, the CAA Annual General Meeting, an equipment exhibition, and the conference banquet and other social events.

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In my last post I mentioned wanting to read the following paper just published in Phonology:

Generative phonology in the late 1940s (pp 37 - 59)
John A. Goldsmith
doi:10.1017/S0952675708001395

I’ve now read it, and I’d like to suggest that the two or three people who might be reading these words read it, too, so we can have a little online discussion about it. If you don’t have access to the journal, you can find a pre-print here (a quick skim reveals it to be about 95% identical in content to the published version). You might also want to heed the encouragement that Goldsmith offers in the next-to-last paragraph:

Needless to say, I encourage the reader to read Wells’ paper for himself, and to judge whether it is not a cautious and careful exegesis of the benefits that can be reaped from derivational analysis, aimed at an audience that was leery of confusing synchronic and diachronic analysis. As a phonologist working at the beginning of the 21st century, I would argue that we should not characterise the work of linguists such as Wells, Harris and Hockett as the last gasp of a dying structuralism, but as a body of scholarship out of which generative phonology was a natural development.

Surely this conclusion is reasonable and, ultimately, not at all surprising. My admiration for generative phonology is in no way diminished by the realisation that its key ideas were being considered and developed by the mid 1940s. It is, after all, the ideas that matter to us now.

(And if that JSTOR link doesn’t work for ya, try this.)

OK, we’ll reconvene sometime next week. I’ll plan to start, but if anyone feels like chiming in before I do, please feel free.