Monthly Archives: September 2016

CFP: Workshop on Sound Change Edinburgh

2ND CALL FOR PAPERS
4th Workshop on Sound Change
University of Edinburgh, UK
19-22 April 2017

Abstract submission for the 4th International Workshop on Sound Change (WSC4) is open until 15 October 2016.

WSC4 is the continuation of the highly successful workshop series that have previously been held in Barcelona (2010), Kloster Seeon (2012) and Berkeley (2014). The aim of this workshop series is to bring together scholars from a wide range of theoretical and methodological backgrounds in order to foster truly collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the actuation, evaluation, transmission, and diffusion of sound change.

The theme of this workshop is “individuals, communities, and sound change”, with special attention to the role of individual differences in the initiation and propagation of change. By “individual differences”, we refer to those psychological, sociological, genetic and/or behavioural differences between the individuals who make up a speech community at the levels of production, perception and cognitive representation.

The workshop will consist of oral presentations, discussion sessions, and poster sessions. We welcome abstracts on any topic related to the workshop themes or to empirical research on sound change more generally. Abstract submitters may choose to have their abstract considered either for a poster only, or for a poster or a talk. Following past practice for the WSC, we anticipate that most abstracts selected for presentation will be allocated a poster presentation slot. A small number of abstracts which fit with the theme of the workshop will be selected to be presented as talks (in addition to the talks from invited speakers).

Anonymized abstracts (PDF, 12 point font, max 1 page text + 1 page figures and references) may be submitted via EasyAbstracts. You may submit no more than one abstract as first author. To submit an abstract, please use the submission page at http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/wsc4.

WSC4 will be held at the University of Edinburgh from 20-22 April 2017; two satellite workshops will be held on 19 April 2017. For more details, please refer to the WSC4 website:

http://lel.ed.ac.uk/wsc/

For questions or more information, contact the organisers by email at wsc@ed.ac.uk.

PhD Scholarships at University of Canterbury

E-mail from Kevin Watson to MFM list

PhD Scholarships

Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

http://www.arts.canterbury.ac.nz/linguistics/

Deadline: 15th October 2016

We are pleased to announce the availability of University of Canterbury Doctoral Scholarships, which are tenable in the University of Canterbury Department of Linguistics in Christchurch, New Zealand. Staff in Linguistics at UC have expertise in phonetics & phonology, syntax, sociophonetics & language variation and change, as well as other areas (see below). The Linguistics Department is part of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour (NZILBB), and as such, presents substantial opportunities for multi-disciplinary research (see http://www.nzilbb.canterbury.ac.nz). NZILBB also houses a variety of state-of-the-art equipment, including Ultrasound, Electromagnetic Articulography, EEG, and 3D motion tracking. We also have several large corpora, including the ONZE corpus (Origins of New Zealand English), the QuakeBox corpus, and the OLIVE corpus (Origins of Liverpool English). Any of these resources would be available to the successful candidate(s) for PhD research.

 

UC Scholarships provide NZ$21,000/year for three years, plus cover the university fees. There are no restrictions on regional origin of the applicants. The application deadline is October 15th (NZ time).

 

The PhD at the University of Canterbury is by thesis only, and interested candidates should, in the first instance, make contact with a potential supervisor in the Linguistics Department to discuss their research ideas. The currently available supervisors in the Linguistics Department are: Lynn Clark, Jen Hay, Beth Hume, Heidi Quinn and Kevin Watson.

 

  • Lynn Clark – language variation & change, sociophonetics, usage-based models of language
  • Donald Derrick – speech production and perception, articulatory phonetics, including ultrasound
  • Jen Hay – sociophonetics, laboratory phonology, morphology, lexical representation, NZ English
  • Beth Hume – phonology, phonetics/phonology interface, language variation, language change
  • Heidi Quinn – syntax, languages of the Pacific
  • Kevin Watson – sociophonetics, sociolinguistics, varieties of English

 

Faculty contact details are available here:

http://www.arts.canterbury.ac.nz/linguistics/people/index.shtml

 

Following discussion with a potential supervisors, applicants should apply both for admission to the University of Canterbury PhD programme, and for the scholarship. Both applications must be made before the scholarship deadline. Applications are processed via MyUC, the University of Canterbury’s online portal. After registering with the system, applicants can apply for UC programmes and are guided through the process online. MyUC can be found here: https://myuc.canterbury.ac.nz/

 

For further information about the scholarship:  http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/scholarshipsearch/ScholarshipDetails.aspx?ScholarshipID=6935.127

 

If you have questions, contact: Kevin Watson kevin.watson@canterbury.ac.nz

McCarthy and Pater 2016: Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism

From Equinox Press

Just Published!

image001

Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism

Edited by John J. McCarthy and Joe Pater, both of University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Series: Advances in Optimality Theory edited by Vieri Samek-Lodovici, University College London, and Armin Mester, University of California, Santa Cruz

HB 9781845531492

446pp

£85 / $110

To receive 25% off quote the code Harmonic. To order and to view a full description and table of contents, follow this link.

Prince, Del Busso and Merchant 2016: OTWorkplace Quick Start Guide

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/article/view/1564

ROA: 1291
Title: OTWorkplace Quick Start Guide
Authors: Alan Prince, Natalie DelBusso, Nazarre Merchant
Length: 68
Abstract: OTWorkplace provides an interactive environment for linguistic research, which calculates, manipulates, and displays the essential objects of OT and Harmonic Serialism. These give the investigator accurate and complete information about ranking and harmonic bounding, as well as extensive information about typologies constructed from well-defined systems of constraints and candidates.

 

The Quick Start Guide comes in the form of an annotated Excel workbook, a kind of slide show on steroids. In addition to presenting the basic organization and functionality of the program, the Guide includes an interactive easily-filtered table of all the analytical and editing tools that the user has access to. The program itself, along with information about it and about the OT concepts it is based on, may be downloaded from the OTWorkplace website.

 

Automated violation counting using the standard *-operator, regular expressions, and user-defined functions enables extensive, rapid, and error-free investigation of systems exactly as they are defined. Together with automated candidate generation, this makes heuristic probing a thing of the past. A variety of generators and constraints relevant to the study of prosody are built in.

 

OTWorkplace produces structured Excel workbooks that are organized into projects, facilitating systematic research. An indexing system makes it easy for the user to keep track of progress, and a global text search utility allows for the retrieval of all notes and observations.

 

OTWorkplace is entirely open source: all code is present and user-accessible. Scripted in VBA and Ruby, a user can easily modify and expand it for specific research purposes. Basic system requirements are Windows, any version, and Excel, any version. The Installer Package contains everything else that is needed, including Graphviz, Ruby, RUBOT and the master OTWorkplace xlsm file itself.

 

OTWorkplace was written by Alan Prince, Bruce Tesar, and Nazarre Merchant, with additional programming by Luca Iacoponi and Natalie DelBusso. It is maintained by Prince and Merchant. Queries and observations may be sent to otworkplace@gmail.com.

 

GDRI Phonological Theory Agora: International network 3rd meeting on Phonology and Lexicon

GDRI Phonological Theory Agora: International network

3rd meeting on Phonology and Lexicon

http://pta.cnrs.fr/meeting3

From sophie.wauquier@orange.fr

The Phonological Theory Agora (PTA) aims at being a platform for debate on theoretical issues. We do so (among other things) by organizing yearly venues where phonologists can meet to discuss recent advances as well as issues in phonological theory. We are not devoted to any specific theory and welcome contributions from any theoretical stance.

This 2016 venue will take place in Tours (France) on October 14th and 15th. There will be two days divided into three sessions.

Day 1: The symposium will be devoted to the relation between Phonology and the Lexicon, featuring Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and Donca Steriade as keynote speakers. Presentations will be short (5-10 minutes), and discussion after those relatively long (25-20 minutes). Potential speakers are invited to only (a) make a claim, and (b) give some key arguments for it. Although it is not impossible to support the position with empirical material, the emphasis should be on the implications for phonological theory at large. In the morning of the first day, there will be a tutorial by Ricardo Bermudez-Otero and Donca Steriade on Phonology and the Lexicon.

Day 2: There will be a workshop whose goal is to promote discussion and theory-oriented debate in an original way: a data set will be defined that everybody works on to show how it could be analyzed in different theories. This year’s topic is height harmony in German.

Andersson (2016) – Sieves and Herrings: For Distinctive Vowel Length in Swedish

Sieves and Herrings: For Distinctive Vowel Length in Swedish
Samuel Andersson

direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003136
September 2016

In this article, I reexamine the question of vowel and consonant length in Swedish, a hotly debated topic since at least Elert (1955). Vowel and consonant length depend on, and mutually predict, each other, so it’s difficult to tell which is phonemic. I look at the traditional arguments used in the literature, but also introduce internal and external evidence that’s never previously been discussed. The evidence favours Vowel Theory, where vowel length is distinctive. I’ll also show that all major assumptions of Consonant Theory are false. I do this using evidence like minimal pairs for vowel length, previously claimed to be logically impossible in Swedish. I’ll conclude that it’s difficult to keep believing in underlying consonant length, and that an analysis with vowel length is better.

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003136
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Stockholm
keywords: swedish, standard central swedish, length, quantity, vowel length, consonant length, phonology, morphophonology, phonology

Bermudez-Otero (2016): Stratal Phonology

Stratal Phonology
Ricardo Bermudez-Otero
September 2016

direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003118

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to survey current work in Stratal Phonology, to respond to recent arguments against cyclic phonological derivations, and to explore the morphological implications of the theory. Section 2 lays out the basic principles of Stratal Phonology: cyclicity and stratification. These make major empirical predictions, including Cyclic Containment, the Russian Doll Theorem, and Chung’s Generalization. The exposition highlights the fact that Stratal Phonology differs from other cyclic frameworks, such as Cophonology Theory, in positing relatively fewer cycles. Recent proposals are reviewed which look to independent facts in an effort to derive long-standing generalizations about cyclic domain structures: notably, the noncyclic status of roots and the recursiveness of stem-level domains. Section 3 addresses the contest between cyclicity and output-output correspondence, focusing on Steriade’s (1999) claim that English dual-level affixes like _-able_ challenge Cyclic Containment. I argue that, whilst Steriade’s argument draws force from important empirical facts, containment-compliant analyses centred on lexical acquisition not only describe the phenomena accurately, but also generate correct empirical predictions that are not matched by accounts relying on output-output correspondence. Section 4 assesses Stratal Phonology by evaluating the plausibility of its implications for morphology. I show, first, that the theory can derive the relative ordering of phonological strata without recourse to the Affix Ordering Generalization, and that it can handle bracketing paradoxes without recourse to rebracketing operations. At the same time, Stratal Phonology presupposes that morphology and phonology are distinct grammatical modules, and for this reason it favours concatenativist approaches to putative instances of process morphology, in line with Generalized Nonlinear Affixation.

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003118
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Forthcoming in S.J. Hannahs & Anna R. K. Bosch (eds.), The Routledge handbook of phonological theory. Abingdon: Routledge.
keywords: affix order, bracketing paradox, cophonology theory, cyclicity, dual-level affix, english, german, indonesian, interfaces of phonology, lexical conservatism, lexical phonology and morphology, modularity, nonconcatenative exponence, opacity, output-output correspondence, stratal optimality theory, stratification, morphology, phonology
previous versions: v2 [September 2016]
v1 [August 2016]

Computational Linguistics position at UCSD

The Department of Linguistics (http://ling.ucsd.edu) within the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in Computational Linguistics at the level of Assistant or (tenured) Associate Professor, beginning July 1, 2017. The Department of Linguistics is committed to academic excellence and diversity within the faculty, staff, and student body. Given that commitment, the department is interested in recruiting candidates who engage in the highest standards of scholarship and professional activity and will make a strong and meaningful contribution to the development of a campus climate that supports equality and diversity.

Qualifications: The department invites applications from specialists in Computational Linguistics who have a demonstrated interest in natural language and its structure.  Candidates must have a PhD in Linguistics or a related field by the start of the appointment on July 1, 2017. Candidates should demonstrate evidence of research productivity, undergraduate and graduate teaching ability, and extramural funding potential.  Candidates who apply at the Associate level should demonstrate a research, teaching, and service record commensurate with that of a tenured Associate Professor, and provide teaching evaluations and evidence of successful mentorship.  Candidates are encouraged to highlight how their research complements existing research on language at UC San Diego. Candidates will also demonstrate strong or potential accomplishments in areas contributing to diversity, equity and inclusion, and a desire to play a leadership role in advancing UC San Diego’s commitment to achieving excellence and diversity. In compliance with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, individuals offered employment by the University of California will be required to verify identity and authorization to work in the United States.

Salary is commensurate with qualifications and based on University of California pay scales.

For full consideration, please submit a completed application, including letters of recommendation, by November 1, 2016.  Applications received after this date may be considered until the position is filled.

Applications at the Assistant level should be submitted to the UC San Diego on-line application collection system, AP-On-Line Recruit, at: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/apply/JPF01208.

Applications at the Associate level should be submitted to the UC San Diego on-line application collection system, AP-On-Line Recruit, at: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/apply/JPF01209.

Applications must include a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements and two representative publications.  Teaching statements at the Associate level should include teaching evaluations and evidence of successful mentorship.  A separate statement describing past experience in activities that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and/or plans to make future contributions is also required. For further information about contributions to diversity statements, see http://facultyexcellence.ucsd.edu/c2d andhttp://diversity.ucsd.edu. Candidates should also arrange for three letters of recommendation to be submitted via the on-line application system.

UCSD is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer with a strong institutional commitment to excellence through diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status.

Phd position in Theoretical Linguistics, Tromsø

One fully funded Doctoral Research Fellowship (PhD position) in Theoretical Linguistics is available at the Department of Language and Culture at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT). The position is affiliated with the research group CASTL-FISH (Center for the Advanced Study of Theoretical Linguistics — Formal Investigations into Structure and Hierarchy).
Application date: 1 October
For more information see:

Phonology job ad at York University, Toronto

Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream – Assistant Professor

Discipline/Field: Linguistics

Home Faculty: Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

Home Department/Area/Division: Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

Affiliation/Union: YUFA

Position Start Date: July 1, 2017

Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

The Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, invites applications for a tenure-stream position in Linguistics at the rank of Assistant Professor to commence July 1, 2017.

The successful candidate will have a PhD in Linguistics, a strong research record and publications, and demonstrated excellence or the promise of excellence in teaching.  We are seeking a candidate whose primary expertise is in the area of Phonetics-Phonology.  In addition to teaching a range of courses in Phonetics and theoretical Phonology, the successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the specialized stream in Human Communication Sciences currently under development by the Linguistics Program.  The successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, be capable of supervising graduate students, and be suitable for prompt appointment to the Faculty of Graduate Studies.  Pedagogical innovation in areas such as experiential education and technology enhanced learning is an asset.

Applicants should submit a signed letter of application, an up-to-date curriculum vitae, samples of scholarly work and copies of student teaching evaluations.  Applicants should arrange to have three signed letters of recommendation sent to Professor Roberta Iannacito-Provenzano, Chair, Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Ross Building, S561, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3.

Electronic or hard copy applications will be accepted.

Email:  lllchair@yorku.ca – (Subject line: “Linguistics Tenure-Track Position”)

Emailed submissions should be in one PDF.

For further information, please contact Professor Gabriela Alboiu (galboiu@yorku.ca), Undergraduate Program Director, Linguistics.

The deadline for applications is November 15, 2016. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. All York University positions are subject to budgetary approval.

York University is an Affirmative Action (AA) employer and strongly values diversity, including gender and sexual diversity, within its community. The AA Program, which applies to Aboriginal people, visible minorities, people with disabilities, and women, can be found at www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or by calling the AA office at 416-736-5713. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents will be given priority.

Posting End Date:  November 15, 2016