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PhonX

Welcome to the Rutgers Phonology and Phonetics Research Group (PhonX)!

Subscribe to PhonX mailing list here.

 

Fall 2024 Meetings:

Monday 9 am – 10 am
Location: Room 319, 1 Spring Street
  • Sept 09: MathLing/PhonX Organisational Meeting
  • Sept 16: AMP 2024 Organising Session
  • Sept 30: AMP 2024 Organising Session
  • Oct 14: AMP 2024 Practice talk
  • Oct 30: Last AMP 2024 Organising Session
  • Nov 01- Nov 03: Annual Meeting on Phonology (Academic Building)
  • Nov 18: Gérard Avelino’s Practise Talk on Leti metathesis, see abstract below:

This paper demonstrates how Boolean monadic recursive schemes (BMRS), a computational method of modeling phonological processes (as proposed in Chandlee & Jardine 2021, characterized in Bhaskar et al. 2020), can model metathesis in Leti, a Timoric language spoken primarily on the island of Leti in the Maluku archipelago. In this language, metathesis—when two segments switch linear position—is morphologically productive and phonologically conditioned. Using data and analyses by Hume (1998) as a starting point, I build on the idea that metathesis is a process that simultaneously deletes a segment and inserts it in a new place, modeling this process using BMRS. In the case of Leti, in certain environments, a word-edge consonant deletes and inserts itself right before its preceding vowel. In contrast with Hume’s optimality and correspondence theory-based analysis, however, BMRS can intuitively account for the environments and opaque phonological interactions driving Leti metathesis without having to appeal to linearity constraints and syllable-level representations, showing that Leti metathesis is a local process that applies to segments.

 

Past meetings:

Spring 2024 Meetings:

Wednesday 10 am – 11 am
Location: Room 108, Linguistics building (18 Seminary Place)
  • Jan 24: AMP 2024 Organising Session
  • Feb 07: Perception of Vowel Devoicing in Central Mexican Spanish – Justin Bland
  • Feb 21: AMP 2024 Organising Session
  • March 6: Linguistics Graduate Open House (no meeting)
  • March 20: Tu+9 Abstract Sharing – Utku Zobarlar and Aidan Sharma
  • April 3: AMP 2024 Organising Session
  • April 17: AMP 2024 Organising Session

Fall 2023 Meetings:

Wednesday 10 am – 11 am
Location: Room 108, Linguistics building (18 Seminary Place)
  • Sept 6: Organizational meeting with MathLing
  • Sept 13: Lionnet (2023) – Marjorie Leduc
  • Sept 29: Invited speaker – Lisa Davidson (NYU): Room 403 at 1 Spring Street
  • Oct 25: Ryan (2023) – Hyunjung Joo
  • Nov 4: Invited speaker – Kyle Gorman (CUNY): Room 403 at 1 Spring Street
  • Dec 29: Revisiting Leti metathesis with Boolean monadic recursive schemes – Gérard Avelino

Spring 2023 Meetings:

Friday 11 am – 12 pm
Location: 1 Spring Street
  • Feb 8: Invited speaker, Shu-hao Shih

Fall 2022 Meetings:

Friday 11 am – 12 pm
Location: 1 Spring Street
  • Sept 9: First meeting
  • Oct 7: AMP practice talk (Huteng & Marjorie)
  • Oct 28: Post AMP meeting
  • Nov 4: Invited speaker, Katie Franich (Harvard)

Spring 2022 Meetings:

  • Professor Akinbiyi Akinlabi’s tone seminar
    1st session: 12:30pm, Feb 11 – Hyman and Leben (2017)
    2nd session: Feb 25
    3rd session: March 11

Fall 2021 Meetings:

After a hiatus during the 2020 pandemic, PhonX is back this semester with hybrid meetings.

Friday 11:00am – 12:00am
Location: Room 108 + Zoom meeting

Spring 2020 Meetings:

Friday 10:00am – 11:50am
Location: Room 108
  • Jan. 24 (WCCFL 2020 practice talk):
    • Topic: “Gradient similarity in Lezgian laryngeal harmony”
    • Speaker: Huteng Dai
  • March 27: (email organizers for the link to our online meeting)
    • Topic: Output-driven Phonology (mini-course series I)
    • Speaker: Bruce Tesar
    • Reading: Tesar, B. (2017). Phonological learning with output-driven maps. Language Acquisition, 24(2), 148-167.
  • April 3:
    • Topic: Output-driven Phonology (mini-course series II)
    • Speaker: Bruce Tesar
  • April 10:
    • Topic: Output-driven Phonology (mini-course series III)
    • Speaker: Bruce Tesar

Fall 2019 Meetings:

  • Sept. 6 (First meeting) 10:00am – 11:00am:
    • Introductions and icebreaker; 
    • The housing and traveling plan of AMP;
    • 5-minutes flash talks about your current research.
  • Sept. 13:
    • Topic: “Ad Hoc Phonetic Categorization and Prediction”
    • Speaker: Ryan Rhodes (RuCCs)
    • Slides: [Link]
  • Oct. 4 (AMP practice presentation): 
    1. Adam McCollum: Sonority-driven stress and vowel reduction in Uyghur
    2. Adam Jardine and Nate Koser: Stress assignment and subsequentiality 
  • Oct. 18:
    • Topic: Unifying Prosodic and Segmental Repair: Metathesis and Epenthesis in Uab Meto 
    • Speaker: Kate Mooney (NYU)
    • Abstract: This paper examines a pattern of metathesis in Uab Meto (Austronesian; Timor, Indonesia), where metathesis is a) synchronically productive, and b) conditioned by phonotactics and sentence prosody requirements. I propose that the order of consonants and vowels is phonologically determined, and so surface alternations in linear order are fully predictable based on variation in the phonotactic environment, such as affixation or prosodic vowel lengthening. This bears on the longstanding debate on the status of metathesis: whether it exists at all synchronically, given its typological rarity (Webb 1974; Hume 1998; a.o.) or if it is not a primitive operation (Takahashi 2018).
  • Nov. 15:
    • Topic: Vowel hiatus resolution and domain-sensitivity in Ikpana
    • Speaker: Bertille Baron (Georgetown)
    • Abstract: Vowel hiatus resolution at word boundaries in Ikpana ([lgq], Kwa, Niger-Congo) is a domain- sensitive phenomenon. At certain word boundaries, vowel hiatus is frequently dispreferred, and vowel reduction is used as a repair strategy. At other word boundaries, vowel hiatus most commonly surfaces as such. This non-categorical alternation between a faithful output and vowel reduction is determined by both the syntactic environment and the syntactic construction in which the underlying hiatus occurs, suggesting the need for the phonological module of grammar to reference syntactic structure, either directly or indirectly. In a Match Theory-based account (Selkirk 2011), this presentation models the empirical facts and accounts for both the resolution strategies and the amount of variation attested in the data.

 

Spring 2019 Meetings:

Mar 16, 10am-12pm:
Practice talks: Dine and Liv (SAL) and Nate (PLC)

 

Organizers:

Faculty Organizer:
Adam McCollum [adam.mccollum@rutgers.edu]

Grad Student Organizer:
Hyunjung Joo [hyunjung.joo@rutgers.edu]
Marjorie Leduc [ml1622@rutgers.edu]
Utku Zobarlar [uz17@scarletmail.rutgers.edu]