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Call for papers

Prosodic Alignment at the Word Level

Mannheim, Germany

November 20–21, 2008

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2008

Topic:

Organization of segments into prosodic constituents is well known to be sensitive to morphological boundaries. Thus, the difference between the cluster ‘tr’ being syllabified as a complex onset in the English word ‘nitrate’ but being coda ‘t’ plus onset ‘r’ instead in ‘night rate’ evidently is a result of their difference in morphological structure.

Currently, a widely accepted approach to this kind of phenomenon involves the notion of alignment. According to this, prosodic domains are in place to satisfy constraints that demand that all morphological constituent boundaries of a particular kind (e.g. word, stem, affix) concide with a prosodic constituent boundary of a particular kind (e.g. phonological word, foot, syllable).

This specialized workshop is on alignment, with focus on word-internal morphological and prosodic constituents. The workshop is to be centered on empirical generalizations rather than being committed to any particular theoretical framework.

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Just published in the Advances in Optimality Theory series from Equinox: Dinnsen & Gierut (eds.), Optimality Theory, Phonological Acquisition and Disorders. The blurb:

Focusing on the phonologies of children with functional (non-organic) speech disorders, this volume reports the latest findings in optimality theory, phonological acquisition and disorders. The book is based on typological, cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental evidence from over 200 children. It stands out because of the unique test case that the population offers to optimality theory, particularly with respect to puzzles of opacity, lawful orders of acquisition, and language learnability. Beyond its theoretical significance, this research holds clinical relevance for the assessment and treatment of disordered populations, most notably the systematic prediction of learning outcomes. The volume bridges the gap between theory and application by showing how each informs the other. It is intended for linguists, psychologists, speech pathologists, second-language instructors and those interested in the latest developments in phonological theory and its applied extensions.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

The University of Manchester invites applications for a Lectureship in Phonetics and Phonology to be held in the Department of Linguistics and English Language. This is a permanent academic post (in US terms, a tenure-track faculty position). The lectureship is available from 1 August 2008. Candidates with a research specialism in any area of phonetics or phonology are encouraged to apply. An ability to provide teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level in both phonetics and phonology will be essential.

Further particulars of the post are available at the following URL:

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/jobs/academic/vacancy/index.htm?ref=135586

Manchester will be familiar to phonoloblog readers as the host of the very successful annual Manchester Phonology Meeting:

http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/mfm.html

For more information about the Department of Linguistics and English Language, please visit its website and blog:

http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/

http://manling.wordpress.com/

The deadline for applications is 30 May 2008.

I’m pleased to announce Charpal, the new-and-very-much-improved version of the IPA symbol plugin for WordPress! Now users of this blog (authors and commenters) can enter phonetic symbols as well as symbols from other character sets easily — and other WordPress bloggers can install the plugin on their own blogs so that their users can do the same. For more details, follow this link.

Big thanks (and mad props) to David Romano for developing the original IPA symbol plugin and for upgrading it to Charpal. Thanks also to Bill Poser for recently discussing character input on Language Log (follow the links here), which is what made me think to ask David if he would upgrade the plugin.

Finally, Jessica Barlow recently pointed out this IPA Unicode keyboard, which has apparently also inspired David to see if he can fashion a similar interface for Charpal…

Haven’t seen a post on this conference yet, but it looks exciting. The first SignTyp Conference is going on at the University of Connecticut this coming June. SignTyp is organized by Harry van der Hulst and Rachel Channon. From the description:

The First SignTyp conference is supported by a NSF grant (BCS-0544944) the aim of which is to establish a crosslinguistic sign phonology and phonetics database. Van der Hulst and Channon are the principal investigators on this project.

The link above is to the conference website. A program with abstracts is available from the site, as well as the usual conference information.

A little poking around the Interwebs reveals that the NAPhC5 program is up. (Did I miss it on LINGUIST List? I don’t think so.) No links to abstracts or anything, but otherwise not a bad-looking website they have up this year.

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The program for the 16th Manchester Phonology Meeting (May 22-24) is up! [Via LINGUIST List.]

I’m fairly sure I’ve noted before that the readership of this blog is very likely a strict (and very small) subset of the readership of Language Log, so if you’re reading this, you’re bound to have already read Bill Poser’s two posts on entering the IPA and other “exotic characters” on the web and elsewhere. Worth perusing, I’d say. I still dig our IPA symbol plugin for WordPress, but its use is obviously limited compared to the tools that Poser talks about.

OUP has also just announced this book, by Jeff Mielke, based on his 2004 OSU dissertation.

(That pretty much covers it, doesn’t it? Not quite; see the next post.)

OUP has just announced (via LINGUIST List) this book, edited by Bert Vaux and Andrew Nevins. Here’s the TOC:

1. Introduction: The Division of Labor of Rules, Representations, and Constraints in Phonological Theory, Andrew Nevins and Bert Vaux
2. Why the Phonological Component Must be Serial and Rule-Based, Bert Vaux
3. Ordering, David Odden
4. Stress-Epenthesis Interactions, Ellen Broselow
5. Representational Economy, William Idsardi and Eric Raimy
6. Fenno-Swedish Quantity: Contrast in Stratal OT, Paul Kiparsky
7. SPE Extensions: Conditions on Representations and Defect Driven Rules, John Frampton
8. Constraining the Learning Path Without Constraints, or The OCP and NoBanana, Charles Reiss

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