Colloquium

Location – Royce Hall 362 Title: Prosodic structure, timing, and fortition-lenition patterns Abstract: This talk reviews cross-linguistic evidence that certain common lenition processes such as spirantization, intervocalic voicing, and flapping take place in a component of grammar that governs the fine-grained temporal dynamics of speech sounds and their interaction with prosodic structure. I argue that […]

Location – Math and Science 5200 Title: Morpheme Ordering Happens in the Phonology Abstract: The determination of the order of morphemes within words has traditionally been modeled using cyclic concatenation, the one-by-one attachment of affixal morphemes to the root, guided by morphosyntactic constituency via the “Mirror Principle” (Baker 1985). In this talk, I propose an alternative, […]

Languages vary in their phonotactics: how sounds are allowed to be sequenced into words. For example, although English, Spanish, and Farsi all have the sounds /p l s/, English allows the complex onsets /sp/ and /pl/, as in ‘speech’ and ‘play’, Spanish only /pl/, as in ‘playa’, while Farsi allows no complex onsets at all. […]

Location – Royce Hall 362 The department tour slot is still open. You can sign up here (same link). When the phonological mind meets another modality: Two-handed articulation in Shanghai Sign Language Abstract: To what extent are the phonological systems of languages, spoken or signed, structured similarly if we assume that they both draw on […]

In this talk I show (based on joint cross-linguistic work with various collaborators) that distributive  — i.e., `classical’ — meanings for the universal part of the language (connectives and DP-internal quantifiers) correspond to bigger morpho-syntactic structures while the corresponding smaller structures have a weak (plural) meaning. This, I will argue, raises a problem for a […]

Dependent case by Agree: Ergative in Shawi (joint work with Emily Clem, UCSD)Ergative and accusative behave as dependent cases insofar as their appearance on a nominal depends on the presence of another nominal in the same domain. Recent work on case theory has taken the phenomenon of case dependency to challenge the idea that case is […]

Pragmatic Indecision Vague predicates are obligatorily tolerant (Wright 1973).  For example, the positive form gradable adjective ‘long’ cannot be used to draw a sharp distinction, even when the facts of the context of utterance and the semantic properties of the sentence in which it occurs otherwise conspire to make such uses possible:  in a context […]

Location – Haines Hall 220

  I will present ongoing work aimed at developing a framework for formulating phonetic grammars of tone realization that can derive complete fundamental frequency (f0) contours from phonological specifications. The proposed framework consists of two main components: A set of weighted constraints that select and locate optimal tone targets for a given phonological representation, and […]

  Anticipatory nasalization in A’ingae: Language-specific phonetics, not incomplete neutralization (Joint work with Scott AnderBois, Shen Aguinda, and Hugo Lucitante)   Cross-linguistically, vowels often undergo contextual nasalization in and sequences. In English, vowel nasalization in appears partial rather than categorical. Cohn (1990, 1993) influentially argued that vowels in contexts in English are phonologically unspecified for […]