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....