Category Archives: Conference calls and programs

Call for Papers: Journées FLORAL-(I)PFC 2019: French in the World

Since 2002, the international research programme PFC (Phonologie du français contemporain/ Phonology of Contemporary French, https://www.projet-pfc.net/), which gathers an international panel of linguists working on French corpus phonology, yearly organises a conference in Paris. The objective of this meeting is to move forward French phonology in a welcoming and scientifically critical atmosphere. It is thus a meeting place for researchers, both junior and senior ones, who wish to discuss their ongoing work – whether it focuses on phenomena well-known or little known in the scientific literature. The PFC programme, primarily devoted to phonology, has in the last few years
been extended to cover other domains of linguistics, i.e. syntax and sociolinguistics, leading to a collaboration with the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique de l’Université d’Orléans, and the creation of a research network on oral French: FLORAL (Français Langue Orale et Recherches Avancées en Linguistique/Oral French and Advanced Studies in Linguistics). PFC further focuses on interphonology and the pedagogical aspects of pronunciation through the daughter project IPFC (Interphonologie du français contemporain/ Interphonology of Contemporary French, http://cblle.tufs.ac.jp/ipfc/).

The conference “Journées FLORAL-(I)PFC 2019” is organised around two main topics:

Francophonie and phonologies in contact
Interphonology and didactics of oral French

The format of the contributions will be 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. Other formats can be considered all depending on the number of abstracts received. We accept presentations in French and English.
The abstract (1 page including title and references) must be sent by email to Helene N. Andreassen (Helene.n.andreassen@uit.no), Elissa Pustka (elissa.pustka@univie.ac.at) and Isabelle Racine (isabelle.racine@unige.ch).

Submission deadline: Monday 16 September 2018.

Thanks for sharing this call for papers with other linguists you think might be interested. More information about the conference will be published at the PFC website: http://projet-pfc.net/.

Conference organising committee:
Helene N. Andreassen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Olivier Baude, Paris Nanterre University/HUMA-NUM
Marie-Hélène Coté, University of Lausanne
Sylvain Detey, Waseda University
Julien Eychenne, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Elissa Pustka, University of Vienna
Isabelle Racine, University of Geneva

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 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

APAP 2019 Call for Papers

Call Deadline: 28-Feb-2019

Meeting Description:

Approaches to Phonology and Phonetics (APAP 2019)
21-23 June, 2019
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

APAP is an international biennial conference organized by two Polish universities:

Maria Curie-Sk?odowska University, Lublin, (UMCS)
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, (KUL)

The conference intends to provide a forum for sharing theoretical, empirical and pedagogical findings on all aspects of phonology and phonetics, with particular attention paid to how the two domains of research relate to each other. Each conference has a leading theme which guarantees a focused debate and, as an outcome, a monographic publication of articles.

Leading theme: “Focus on phonotactics: phonology, phonetics, acquisition”

The following scholars have kindly agreed to deliver plenary talks:

Katarzyna Dziubalska-Ko?aczyk (Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna?)

Marketa Ziková (Masaryk University, Brno)

Marzena Zygis (Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)

For further information on APAP (registration, fees, accomodation) email us at the following address: apapconference2015@gmail.com and our web page http://www.apap.kul.pl

Conference chair: Karolina Drabikowska

Call for Papers:

We invite proposals for papers concerning the main theme as well as other phonetic and phonological issues.

Leading theme: “Focus on phonotactics: phonology, phonetics, acquisition”

Papers are given 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Abstracts of 250-400 words should be emailed to the organizers at the following address: apapconference2019@gmail.com

Important Deadlines:

Abstract submission: February 28, 2019
Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2019
Registration and payment of conference fee: April 30, 2019

Organizing Committee:

Eugeniusz Cyran

Jolanta Szpyra-Koz?owska
Agnieszka Bry?a-Cruz

Krzysztof Jasku?a
S?awomir Zdziebko

Marek Radomsk

43th PLC call for papers: Linguistics and Biology

AMP 2018 Program available

The 2018 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2018) will be held on October 5-7, 2018 in San Diego, CA, USA. The program of talks is now available here. The conference will feature three invited talks (Junko Ito and Armin Mester, Laura McPherson, Bert Remijsen) as well as a fully integrated workshop entitled Methods in phonological data collection and analysis of underdocumented languages with three associated tutorials (by Gabriela Caballero, Marc Garellek, and Bert Remijsen). In addition, there will be a tutorial of Syntax-Prosody in OT and a short demo of PhonoApps.

Prospective participants can find out more about the conference at our website (phonology.ucsd.edu) and can register for it at phonology.ucsd.edu/registration (student registration is free; non-student registration is $100 until Sept. 21, after which it is $120). We look forward to seeing many of you in San Diego in October!

Call for papers: Journées FLORAL-(I)PFC 2018 – Language contact and corpus (inter) phonology

Since 2002, the international research programme PFC (Phonologie du français contemporain/Phonology of Contemporary French, cf. https://www.projet-pfc.net/), which gathers an international panel of linguists working on French corpus phonology, yearly organises a conference in Paris. The objective of this meeting is to move forward French phonology in a welcoming and scientifically critical atmosphere. It is thus a meeting place for researchers, both junior and senior ones, who wish to discuss their ongoing work – whether it focuses on phenomena well-known or little known in the scientific literature. The PFC programme, primarily devoted to phonology, has in the last few years been extended to cover other domains of linguistics, i.e. syntax and sociolinguistics, leading to a collaboration with the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique de l’Université d’Orléans, and the creation of a research network on oral French: FLORAL (Français Langue Orale et Recherches Avancées en Linguistique/Oral French and Advanced Studies in Linguistics). PFC further focuses on interphonology and the pedagogical aspects of pronunciation through the daughter project IPFC (Interphonologie du français contemporain/Interphonology of Contemporary French, http://cblle.tufs.ac.jp/ipfc/), which this year has its tenth anniversary.

This year’s edition of the conference takes place on Thursday 22 November – Tuesday 27 November, at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. It is organised as three separate yet interrelated parts:

– The first day of the conference (Thursday 22 November) is thematic, and this year we dedicate it to language contact and minority languages. This day is thus not limited to work on French and the francophone world, but rather permits to widen the perspectives beyond the PFC corpus.

– The traditional part of the conference, the “Journées PFC”, takes place on Friday 23 and in the morning of Saturday 24. These two days are devoted to presentations relating to the PFC corpus or other works within the domain of corpus phonology.

– Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 are dedicated to works on interphonology and didactics of oral French. As these two days celebrate the 10 years of IPFC, works based on data from this project will be preferred.

The abstract (1 page including title and references) must be sent by email to Helene N. Andreassen (helene.n.andreassen@uit.no) and Isabelle Racine (isabelle.racine@unige.ch). Submission deadline: Saturday 15 September 2018.

Thanks for sharing this call for papers with other linguists you think might be interested. More information about the conference will be published at the PFC website: https://www.projet-pfc.net/.

This conference receives financial support from the Norwegian University Center in Paris, the University of Geneva and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Conference organising committee:

Helene N. Andreassen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Olivier Baude, Paris Nanterre University/HUMA-NUM

Marie-Hélène Coté, University of Lausanne

Sylvain Detey, Waseda University

Julien Eychenne, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

Martin Krämer, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Chantal Lyche, University of Oslo

Elissa Pustka, University of Vienna

Isabelle Racine, University of Geneva

Analyzing Typological Structure: From Categorical to Probabilistic Phonology

The Department of Linguistics at Stanford University and the Stanford Humanities Center will host a one-day workshop dedicated to exploring the typological limits of probabilistic phonological grammars. The workshop is partially funded by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies as part of the project The Mathematics of Language Universals.

Location: Stanford University

Workshop date: Saturday, September 22, 2018

Invited speaker: Prof. Bruce Hayes, UCLA

More information: https://sites.google.com/site/analyzingtypologicalstructure/

Organizers: Arto Anttila (Stanford) and Giorgio Magri (CNRS)

Call for Papers:

A basic question in theoretical phonology is what a theory includes and what it excludes. A good theory should be flexible enough to closely fit the data at hand, but it should also have empirical typological content and exclude unnatural patterns. In terms of empirical fit modern phonological theories are ambitious and successful. In terms of typological content their predictions are often obscure and sometimes unknown.

The typological limits of phonological theories have been studied from various perspectives, including formal language theory (Johnson 1972, Kaplan & Kay 1994, Chandlee & Heinz 2017), factorial typologies (Prince and Smolensky 1993), Property Theory (Alber, DelBusso, & Prince 2016), algebraic methods (Merchant & Riggle 2016), and T-orders (Anttila & Magri 2018). These theoretical developments have in turn produced useful software, including finite-state tools (Beesley and Karttunen 2003, Huldén 2017), OTSoft (Hayes, Tesar, & Zuraw 2017), OTHelp (Staubs, Becker, Potts, Pratt, McCarthy, & Pater 2010), OTKit (Biró 2010), PyPhon (Riggle, Bane, & Bowman 2011), OTWorkplace (Prince, Tesar, & Merchant 2012), T-Order Generator (Anttila and Andrus 2006), and OTOrder (Djalali & Jeffers 2015), among others. These tools make it possible to explore the typological predictions of large and complex models that progressively approximate the empirical complexity of natural language phonology.

A major obstacle that stands in the way of progress is that typological analysis tools usually only apply to categorical models. Over the past two decades many phonologists have turned to quantitative data and worked extensively on patterns of stochastic variation and gradient acceptability. Such analyses often invoke probabilistic grammars, such as Stochastic OT (Boersma and Hayes 2001), Noisy Harmonic Grammar (Boersma and Pater 2016), and MaxEnt (Goldwater and Johnson 2003, Hayes and Wilson 2008). This work typically has the goal of showing that the models are rich enough to avoid undergeneration, but less attention has been paid to the question of overgeneration. The key question is how to analyze the typological structure induced by probabilistic models. The question is not trivial: while the typologies predicted by categorical phonology are usually finite, probabilistic frameworks generate an infinite family of different probability distributions.

We invite abstracts (1-2 pages, pdf) for a 30-minute talk, followed by a 15-minute discussion. We welcome submissions that address questions of the following type:

– What do probabilistic typologies look like?
– How can one effectively compute probabilistic typologies?
– Do probabilistic grammars overgenerate?
– How can one tell whether probabilistic typologies contain crazy grammars?
– How do Optimality Theory, Harmonic Grammar, and MaxEnt differ typologically?
– What is the relationship between learnability and overgeneration?
– Do learnability arguments trump tight typological predictions?

Abstracts should be emailed to anttilastanford.edu (Anttila) and magrigrggmail.com (Magri)

Abstract submission deadline: June 25, 2018, 11:59pm PST

Notification of acceptance: July 9, 2018.

Our goal is to have a relatively small number of talks and plenty of time for informal interaction.

More information: https://sites.google.com/site/analyzingtypologicalstructure/
Organizers: Arto Anttila (Stanford) and Giorgio Magri (CNRS)

Programme – Réseau Français de Phonologie 16, Paris

OTWorkplace workshop at AMP 2018

From the AMP 2018 organizers at UC San Diego

In association with the bonus Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT) tutorial at AMP 2018, we are hoping to gather both experienced and novice OTWorkplace users to share OTWorkplace uses and tools.

If you are interested in attending an OTWorkplace workshop at AMP 2018, please fill out this form (https://tinyurl.com/otworkplace-amp2018) by June 15, 2018, 11:59pm PDT / 23:59 GMT-7.

Phonolist

Phonological announcements and discussion