phonology strikes back
After this week’s TOM (Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop) at McGill, the phonologists will have their say at next week’s MOT (Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Phonology Workshop) at Carleton.
tom this saturday
More stuff going this week at McGill than just mg3: TOM, the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal workshop on semantics is taking place this Saturday. Here’s the program: TOM.
music and gesture 3
This weekend, the third conference on music and gesture will take place in Montreal this coming Friday and Saturday. Marcin Swoboda and I will be presenting on Encoding emotion: how performers manipulate tempo locally to convey affect.
The conference forms part of the musimars music festival, organized this year under the theme ‘gestural music–musical gesture.’ All throughout this week, there will be concerts and lectures at the Schulich School of Music.
paper on relative boundary strength
Here’s the revised version of our paper on gradient boundary strength and disambiguation, soon to be presented at speech prosody:
Abstract: Previous research found that the relative rather than the absolute size of prosodic boundaries is crucial in disambiguating attachment ambiguities [1, 2]. Furthermore, relative categorical differences matter whereas merely quantitative ones do not [1]. This paper presents further evidence that relative boundary strength is indeed what is crucial, but, contrary to earlier findings, gradient quantitative differences in boundary rank affect parsing decisions in gradient ways. Furthermore, varying the plausibility of a given reading in a given context shifts the perceptual boundaries between different phrasings such that quantitatively stronger prosodic cues are necessary to counter-act a prior bias against it.
on linguistic interfaces II
The call for papers for the second conference on linguistic interfaces was posted. The deadline is April 30th. Here’s part of the conference description:
A full description of our knowledge of language must include reference to several different components, each with its own particular properties. These components must interact with each other, and with a lexicon, which we may think of as a system of stored associations between pieces of information pertaining to many of the above components. In recent years, the study of the interaction between these different levels of linguistic knowledge has attracted increasing interest. The nature and extent of the interaction of different linguistic modules is a central question to be addressed by a modern theory of linguistic knowledge. […]
deadline for tie extended
The deadline for TIE 4 in Stockholm was extended: The new deadline is February 22nd.
extended deadline until Feb 15: mosaic 2
The deadline for Mosaic 2 was extended. Monday is the final day to submit a paper!
Mosaic is a workshop bringing together semanticists active in Canada. It’s a satellite meeting of the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
heads-up: statistics workshop
Statistics Workshop on Logit Mixed Models, May 3-4 2010 at McGill
The gripp reading group and the CRLMB are organzing a statistics workshop on logit mixed models. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester) and his lab will give several tutorials on this and related topics on May 3 and 4 (we might have a 3rd day though). The workshop is co-sponsored by the CRLMB, prosody.lab, the Mcgill Infant Development Cluster, and the PoP lab, and is organized by Aparna Nadig, Kris Onishi and me.
Further information will be posted in early March. Hope to see you there!
if worst comes to worst
I was about to write if worse comes to worst in an email, and then realized that I’m actually not sure what the correct idiom exactly is. The difference between worse and worst is hard to hear, and it’s not so clear that it has a transparent compositional meaning, so neither sound nor meaning really help. A quick Google vote seemed to resolve this, but not in an entirely crisp way:
“worst comes to worst” – 149.000 hits
“worse comes to worst” – 47.800 hits
“worst comes to worse” – 578.000 hits
“worse comes to worse” – 7.370.00 hits
So I went with ‘worse comes to worse.’ However, the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English usage states that the original phrase is ‘if the worst comes to the worst,’ first used in 1597, and then goes to say that
More …did you say toyota or toyoda?
The name of the car company and that of its president and CEO (a grandson of its founder Kiichiro Toyoda) are homophonous (or at least nearly homophonous)–in North American English, that is. Both [t] and [d] become flaps intervocalically after a stressed syllable.
It’s interesting though to see what people do when they want to emphasize which one of the two words were intended. According to various people I’ve polled (some of them currently taking my experimental class at the moment), one way to disambiguate is to shift stress to the last syllable and thus bleed the application of flapping.
This is an example of focus within-word focus. In his 1961 paper on contrastive accent and contrastive stress Dwight Bolinger describes another instance:
In a New Yorker cartoon a man stands upside down, with feet on the ceiling, in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist says to the man’s wife, ‘In a case of this kind, Mrs. Hall, our first concern is to persuade the patient that he is a stalagmite’ (last syllable underlined in original).
There’s a nice paper byRon Artstein that discusses the semantics of this kind of focus below he word level.
It’s conceivable though that a speaker might shift stress even in the absence of such a contrasting minimal pair, in order to clarify the spelling (or underlying form?) of a word. If this way of avoiding flapping became a regular process, it would constitute a violation of a generalization that is otherwise very robust, (the ‘two-many-solutions-problem’, see Donca Steriade’s paper on the P-Map and
Lev Blumenfeld’s 2006 thesis): Prosodically conditioned lenition-processes such as foot-internal flapping are not mirrored by hypothetical processes that would shift stress for the purpose of avoiding the lenition to apply. This is surprising under an optimality-theoretic analysis of such processes that uses the interaction of markedness and faithfulness constraints, since shifting stress would be another way to avoid the markedness-violation incurred by intervocalic post-tonic [t] or [d], so it would be easy to create a correct ranking for such a grammar. However, languages don’t ever seem to pick this solution. They either stay faithful or lenite.
So does the English strategy to emphasize the underlying (or at least orthographic) contrast between ‘Toyota’ and ‘Toyoda’ show that this generalization is not really true? Maybe not: for all we know, the stress shift observed here might be an acrobatic act that savvy users of English use to disambiguate otherwise homophonous words based on their own phonological knowledge, but not something that could ever become a regular grammatical process that could be generalized to all flapping environments.
On the other hand, maybe such a process is simply unlikely to be develop: Languages might conserve a contrast (as in languages that don’t have flapping, say British English) or lenite–but under what scenario would a language develop a stress shift that serves the purpose of avoiding a neutralization brought about by a lenition process which, however, could never be observed in the first place if there were a stress shift? Developing such a pre-emptive phonological process might simply be an unlikely scenario for a language change.
Shifting stress is different from other forms of enhancement (which one could argue are similarly pre-emptive) since it comes at the cost of changing a property that itself is contrastive in English, word-stress. Another difference might be that shifting stress does not exaggerate a tendency that is already present with the original contrast (That’s an empirical question: Could a hyper-articulated rendition of [toi!] in French at times be aspirated? Could a hyper-articulated British English rendition of [water] at times shift stress to the last syllable? It seems to me the former is much more likely than the latter, but maybe I’m wrong).
So it’s not so obvious that there is a ‘two-many-solutions’ problem in this case. Of course, this type of explanation might only be feasible in a small subset of cases in which the ‘two-many-solutions’ problem has been observed.
[some edits on February 9, 2010]