The inaugural Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF 2019) will be held on April 5 and 6, 2019.
PɸF 2019 will run parallel with the second meeting of the Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST).
The theme for PɸF 2019 is “the representation of gradience in phonology”. Representations are a crucial component of phonological theory. Most of the representations that we use today (segments, features, Autosegmental representations, etc.) were developed before the advent of Optimality Theory, which temporarily switched the focus of the discipline from representations to grammatical architecture and computation.
Several recent independent research programs seem to show that the trend may be changing. Common to all is the idea that phonology needs richer representations than traditionally assumed. These must include various properties often not considered to fall within the purview of phonology, such as:
– Phonetic details (e.g. subphonemic perceptual and/or articulatory properties of segments, phonotactic contextual effect
– Morphological information (e.g. root vs. affix position)
– Strength of phonological activity (e.g. identical segments or features differing in whether/how often they trigger or undergo certain phonological processes)
– Frequency, predictability (of lexical items in discourse, of phonemes in the lexicon, etc.)
This workshop is meant to foster discussion about the question of phonological gradience and its representation, around two central questions: what are the possible sources of gradience in phonology? What kinds of representations (if any) do we need to account for phonological gradience?
On Friday April 5, the workshop will run from 1:30pm to 6pm, and on Saturday April 6, 9am to 5pm. On Saturday evening, all attendees are invited to join us for refreshments following the workshop.
PɸF 2019 Speakers
Sharon Inkelas (UC Berkeley)
John Kingston (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Florian Lionnet (Princeton University)
Scott Moisik (Nanyang Technological university, Singapore)
Claire Moore-Cantwell (Simon Fraser University)
Anne Pycha (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
Stephanie Shih (University of Southern California)
Caitlin Smith (University of Southern California)
Paul Smolensky (Johns Hopkins University)
Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Rachel Walker (University of Southern California)
Eva Zimmermann (Leipzig University)
Registration
Registration is free. We ask those planning to attend to register by March 20, 2019 at the link below.
Contact information
Email address: flionnet@princeton.edu
Organizer: Florian Lionnet (Linguistics)
