Pragmatic Indecision Vague predicates are obligatorily tolerant (Wright 1973).  For example, the positive form gradable adjective ‘long’ cannot be used to draw a sharp distinction, even when the facts of the context of utterance and the semantic properties of the sentence in which it occurs otherwise conspire to make such uses possible:  in a context...

Location - Haines Hall 220

  I will present ongoing work aimed at developing a framework for formulating phonetic grammars of tone realization that can derive complete fundamental frequency (f0) contours from phonological specifications. The proposed framework consists of two main components: A set of weighted constraints that select and locate optimal tone targets for a given phonological representation, and...

  Anticipatory nasalization in A’ingae: Language-specific phonetics, not incomplete neutralization (Joint work with Scott AnderBois, Shen Aguinda, and Hugo Lucitante)   Cross-linguistically, vowels often undergo contextual nasalization in and sequences. In English, vowel nasalization in appears partial rather than categorical. Cohn (1990, 1993) influentially argued that vowels in contexts in English are phonologically unspecified for...