Monthly Archives: April 2019

Call for papers: Annual Meeting on Phonology 2019

We are seeking high-quality unpublished research in all areas of theoretical, experimental, and computational phonology for presentation at the 2019 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2019), to take place October 11-13, 2019 and hosted by the Linguistics Department at the Stony Brook University. This is the seventh installment of the Annual Meetings on Phonology, following the 2013 inaugural meeting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and subsequent meetings hosted by MIT, UBC/SFU, USC, NYU and UCSD.

This year’s conference features two workshops entitled “Advances in Computational Phonology” and “The Phonology-Syntax Interface in the World’s Languages” with associated tutorials and invited speakers. We are particularly interested in high-quality research submissions that address the themes of these workshops.

Submission Guidelines

We invite abstracts for either oral presentations or poster presentations. Abstracts must be anonymous, so please be sure to eliminate any identifying information and metadata from the document. Length is limited to a maximum of two single-spaced pages (US Letter), figures and references included. Font size should be 12-point, with margins of at least one inch (2.54cm) left on all sides. Abstracts must be submitted in .pdf file format.

Submissions are limited to three per author, with at most one submission being single-authored.

The deadline for abstract submission is Monday, June 3, 11:59pm EST (23:59 GMT-5).

Abstract submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=amp2019.

Invited Speakers

Contact

All questions about the conference should be emailed to amp2019@stonybrook.edu.

Publication

All presentations (in both the general and workshop sessions) are eligible for publication in the open-access on-line conference proceedings hosted by the Linguistic Society of America. Oral presentations will appear in the main Proceedings and poster presentations will appear in the Supplemental Proceedings.

PLM 2019 Workshop: Modern phonetics and phonological representation: a new outlook on an old controversy

Convenors: Ewelina Wojtkowiak and Katarzyna Dziubalska-Ko?aczyk

Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna?
To learn more about the conference, please visit http://wa.amu.edu.pl/plm/2019/

Irrespective of which units are used – distinctive features (e.g. Chomsky and Halle 1968), elements (e.g. Backley 2011), or articulatory gestures (e.g. Browman and Goldstein 1992), to name a few – phonological representations in general possess a certain level of abstraction in which phonetic detail is oftentimes disregarded. The dissonance between representation and realisation has been the topic of a heated debate for quite some time. In fact, it can be traced back to Trubetzkoy, who saw phonetics and phonology as two separate disciplines which study two completely different phenomena and as such should be kept strictly apart ([1939] 1962: 10). Some phonologists argue that phonetics “is relatively uninteresting” and as such “has no place in linguistics proper” (cf. Pierrehumbert 1990 for an overview; also: Gussmann 2004). In turn, phoneticians argue that phonological representations are not subject to enough scientific research to tell us anything about the sound structure of languages and as such is “an uninteresting subfield of humanities” (Pierrehumbert 1990: 375). Problems with these disagreements between the two sides of this issue arise when we cross-check phonological accounts with empirical data. For instance, Polish has been described as a language in which word-final obstruents undergo devoicing (Gussmann 2007), a claim which has been taken for granted. Phonetic research, however, provides evidence that Polish native speakers seem to  be surprisingly accurate in perceiving the contrast between underlyingly voiceless and voiced obstruents in this position and, while less robust, the contrast is also by and large maintained in their productions (Schwartz et al. 2018). Studies on cross-linguistic influence show that L1 productions change under the influence of one’s L2 and Lns (e.g. Chang 2012, Sypia?ska 2016). Therefore, if phonological representations fail to refer to phonetic research, they may fail to accurately encapsulate linguistic phenomena (cf. Ohala 1990). While some progress in this respect has been made, “phonetics as a motivating force for phonology remains controversial” (Dziubalska-Ko?aczyk 2012).

This workshop invites all papers that investigate the issue relating to the extent to which phonetic detail should affect our decisions about phonological representations, with respect to current phonological models. They may:

  • Present original empirical studies that have been conducted to test phonological hypotheses,
  • Discuss the dubious status of the segment and the apparent stability of morphemes in phonetics and phonology,
  • Focus on intramorphemic phonotactics vs. morphological interactions,
  • Seek to re-think the nature of the distinctive features.

Other ideas related to this theme are also welcome.

Abstract submission deadline: 22 April 2019
Submit your abstract via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference.cgi?conf=plm2019

CALL FOR PAPERS – Recursivity in phonology, below and above the word (RecPhon2019)

CALL FOR PAPERS – Recursivity in phonology, below and above the word (RecPhon2019)
21-22 November 2019, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra  
Abstract submission deadline: June 1, 2019
Research Questions
We encourage speakers to address, although not exclusively, some of the research questions formulated below, either arguing in favor or against recursivity in phonology, and from any theoretical perspective and methodology, including phonological formal analyses of particular languages, language typology, language acquisition, laboratory phonology, psycholinguistics or neurolinguistics.
– Does recursivity in phonology exist at all?
– If recursivity in phonology exists, what exactly can or cannot trigger a recursive structure in the domain of the syntax-phonology interface?
– Is recursivity restricted to higher-ordered phonological constituents like the phonological phrase and the intonational phrase? If so, why?
– What is the empirical evidence to posit recursive structures above the word?
– Does ternarity exist in phonology (at the level of the metrical foot or at higher-ordered levels) or should it be derived from recursive structures?
– If recursivity in phonology also exists below the level of the phonological word, does it show an upper bound on nesting?
– Does recursivity also exist below the level of the metrical foot, i.e. the syllable, the mora?
– What is the empirical evidence to posit recursive structures below the word?
– What does recursivity add to the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, the idea that L1 learners use prosodic features as a cue to identify more abstract properties of grammar such as syntactic constituency?
– Can neural correlates of phonological recursion be observed?
Invited speakers
* Emily Elfner (York University, Canada)
* Junko Ito (University of California, Santa Cruz)
* Armin Mester (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Submission of abstracts
The workshop will feature 45 minute talks (30-35 minutes followed by 15-10 minutes for comments and questions). Abstracts must be submitted through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?key=85542673.1r9spcN1e21u1BLe) by the 1st of June, 2019. Abstracts will be reviewed by 3 anonymous reviewers.
Abstract guidelines
Abstracts must be anonymous, maximally 1 page long (A4), with an extra page for figures, examples, tables and references, 12 pt Times New Roman, with one-inch (2.54 cm) margins on all sides, and written in English, PDF format.
Important dates
Abstract submission deadline: June 1, 2019
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2019
Program announcement: September 15, 2019
Registration: October 1 – November 1, 2019

Pater 2019: Phonological typology in Optimality Theory and Formal Language Theory: Goals and future directions.

Pater, Joe. To appear 2019. Phonological typology in Optimality Theory and Formal Language Theory: Goals and future directions. In Phonology. https://works.bepress.com/joe_pater/37/

Abstract.Much recent work has studied phonological typology in terms of formal language theory (e.g. the Chomsky hierarchy). This paper considers whether Optimality Theory grammars might be constrained to generate only regular languages, and also whether the tools of formal language theory might be used for constructing phonological theories similar to those within Optimality Theory. It offers reasons to be optimistic about the first possibility, and skeptical about the second.

Nyman and Tesar 2019: Determining underlying presence in the learning of grammars that allow insertion and deletion

Nyman, Alexandra and Bruce Tesar. 2019. Determining underlying presence in the learning of grammars that allow insertion and deletion. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 37. 1–41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.603

Abstract
The simultaneous learning of a phonological map from inputs to outputs and a lexicon of phonological underlying forms has been a focus of several research efforts (Jarosz 2006; Apoussidou 2007; Merchant 2008; Merchant & Tesar 2008; Tesar 2014). One of the numerous challenges is that of computational efficiency, which led to the investigation of learning with output-driven maps (Tesar 2014). Prior work on learning with output-driven maps has focused on systems in which the only disparities between inputs and outputs were segmental identity disparities (differences in the value of a feature). Inclusion of segmental insertion and deletion disparities exacerbates computational concerns, as it increases the number of possible correspondence relations between an input and an output, and makes the space of possible inputs for a word infinite due to the possible presence of an unbounded number of deleted segments. We propose an extension of that earlier work to handle phonologies that permit insertion and deletion, and evaluate the proposal by applying it to cases in Basic CV Syllable Theory (Jakobson 1962; Clements & Keyser 1983; Prince & Smolensky 2004). First, we propose that a learner represent information about the possible presence/absence of a segment in an underlying form via a presence feature. The presence feature can be set using the same inconsistency detection method that has previously been used to set other segmental features. This allows the learner to combine evidence from paradigmatically related words in a single compact representation. Second, we propose that the learner only consider for underlying forms segments that surface in at least one surface realization of the morpheme. This approach is justified by the structure of output-driven maps, and avoids the potential for an unbounded number of possibly deleted segments in an underlying form. A proof is given for the validity of the method for avoiding unbounded deletion. The resulting learner is able to learn some grammatical regularities about segmental insertion and deletion; this is shown via two manual step-by-step applications of the algorithm. Verificatory simulations for learning the entire typology of Basic CV Syllable Theory are left to work in the near future.

Call for Posters: Language and Music Workshop May 12, 2019

The UMass Amherst Department of Linguistics and the Department of Music and Dance will host a Language and Music Workshop on the afternoon of Sunday May 12th. There are five invited speakers, listed below, and we invite interested participants to submit brief abstracts for poster presentations (250 – 500 words of text) by Wednesday May 1st by using this Google form:

https://forms.gle/XCjTANMeCuxoeJAr9

We expect to be able to be very liberal in accepting posters, and so wanted the submission format to be relatively informal. If it would be more convenient to submit a .pdf, please fill out the form with names and affiliations, and e-mail the .pdf to pater@umass.edu.

Updates about the workshop can be found here: https://websites.umass.edu/linguist/language-and-music-workshop-may-12-2019/

Speakers

Mara Breen – Mount Holyoke College

The Cat in the Hat: Musical and linguistic metric structure realization in child-directed poetry

François Dell – Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale (CRLAO) CNRS / EHESS, Paris

Delivery design: towards a typology

Bob Ladd – University of Edinburgh

Two problems in theories of tone-melody matching

Laura McPherson – Dartmouth College

Tonal adaptation across musical modality: A comparison of Sambla vocal music and speech surrogates

Christopher White – University of Massachusetts Amherst

Analogies with Language in Machine-learned Musical Grammars

Zymet (2019) – Malagasy OCP targets a single affix: implications for morphosyntactic generalization in learning

Malagasy OCP targets a single affix: implications for morphosyntactic generalization in learning
Jesse Zymet
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004540
March 2019
Despite claims of the existence of phonological processes that apply strictly in limited morphosyntactic domains, recent corpus and experimental findings suggest that such processes are unproductive and difficult to learn. Martin (2011) and Chong (2017) consequently posit learning models having a generality bias, such that they cannot acquire morphosyntactically specific restrictions without supporting statistical tendencies from other domains. This article presents a corpus study of Malagasy backness dissimilation, showing that it applies consistently and exclusively to the passive imperative suffix, the only suffix eligible to undergo it. Dissimilation was extended to loanwords having the suffix and has persisted for multiple generations, but is entirely unsupported by the lexicon, which instead displays a phonotactic harmony tendency. These findings suggest that no degree of generality is necessary for learning. Rather, if the bias is active, then it must be overridable.

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004540
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in Linguistic Inquiry
keywords: generalization, bias, dissimilation, harmony, malagasy, morphology, phonology

Lionnet (2019) – Coarticulation affects faithfulness: Evidence from subphonemically conditioned featural affixation in Laal

Coarticulation affects faithfulness: Evidence from subphonemically conditioned featural affixation in Laal
Florian Lionnet
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004537
March 2019
This paper describes and analyzes the unusually complex multifeatural plural affix /L [+high, +round]/ of Laal (endangered isolate), focusing on its most intriguing property: the realization of the [+round] subexponent is conditioned by the presence of a labial consonant in the base. Instrumental evidence shows that the conditioning factor is the rounding coarticulatory effect exerted on the vowel by the adjacent labial consonant. This is evidence that coarticulation has a role to play in phonology. Specifically, I show that the degree of faithfulness to a feature value[?F] can be weakened if the realization of that feature is affected by coarticulation. I propose an analysis utilizing both subfeatural representations and scalar faithfulness constraints, both of which are shown to be necessary. This analysis is shown to both confirm and supersede Steriade’s (2009) P-map hypothesis. The subfeatural analysis is compared to an Agreement by Correspondence alternative, shown to be less satisfactory.

Hosono (2019) – Eliminating T as an independent syntactic head

Eliminating T as an independent syntactic head
Mayumi Hosono
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004532
March 2019
In this paper, I propose to eliminate T as an independent syntactic head from the computational system of human language. Adopting feature inheritance (Chomsky 2013, 2015) and assuming that tense (and other features, if any) is inherited from C by T, T does not have any contents in lexicon. It is doubtful that T can exist as a legitimate syntactic head, though tense feature definitely exists in human language. Based on Hosono’s (2018) analysis on verb movement, I propose that in languages such as French and English, a verbal head moves and merges to the root, and it inherits tense (and any other functional features) after C merges; in V2 languages, a verbal head directly moves to C, and feature inheritance does not occur. In both cases, I argue, the object which has traditionally been called TP is unlabeled. I also introduce the framework of workspace proposed by Chomsky et al. (2017) and Chomsky (2017), who change the definition of the merging operation from Merge to MERGE and claim that only external and internal MERGE are legitimate, rejecting other merging operations, e.g. countercyclic movement such as verb movement. I argue that without T, the problem on the countercyclic property of verb movement is solved. This is the first draft. Any comments are very welcome.

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004537
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Submitted
keywords: multiple feature affixation, subfeatures, phonetic knowledge, scalar weighted constraints, laal, phonology
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004532
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Ms.
keywords: t(ense), feature inheritance, verb movement, labeling, workspace, merge, countercyclic property., morphology, syntax, phonology

Begus & Nazarov (2019) – Gradient trends against phonetic naturalness: The case of Tarma Quechua

Gradient trends against phonetic naturalness: The case of Tarma Quechua
Gasper Begus, Aleksei Nazarov
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004523
March 2019

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004523
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in Proceedings of NELS 48
keywords: phonotactics, maxent, naturalness, gradient variation, sound change, phonology