Phorum

The Berkeley Phonetics, Phonology and Psycholinguistics Forum ("Phorum") is a weekly talk and discussion series featuring presentations on all aspects of phonology, phonetics and psycholinguistics. We meet on Fridays from 4(:10)-5 pm in Dwinelle 1303 (Zoom link shared upon request). Phorum is organized by Amber Galvano, Maks Dąbkowski, and Noah Macey. Our emails are respectively "amber_galvano," "dabkowski," and "noah.macey" @berkeley.edu.

Fall 2023 Schedule

August 25

Round robin -- introductions, summer updates & data sharing

September 1

Christine Beier (UC Berkeley): Documenting and describing tone in Iquito: a progress report

In this informal, and hopefully interactive, presentation, I will discuss ongoing work to document and describe the tone system of Iquito, a highly endangered Zaparoan language of northern Peruvian Amazonia, sketching out some of the key typological, areal, methodological, analytical, and theoretical issues that have emerged over the years of working with this language and its highly-intricate tone system. Despite being the only member of its family known to exhibit tone, and despite occurring in a part of the world reported to have only a modest density of tone languages, which in turn are said to exhibit, by-and-large, simple tone systems, Iquito turns out to be a tone powerhouse, exhibiting a H, L, Ø (underlying and surface) tone inventory; (usually HLL) lexical melodies and (always H) boundary tones; both rightward and leftward tone spreading; both linked and floating tones; both fixed and mobile melodies; and various morphological and constructional (grammatical) melodies, all integrated via dominance relations among the many domains involved in word and utterance formation. The discussion will be organized around the central question of how to balance descriptive clarity (especially with heritage learners in mind), analytical precision, and theoretical/disciplinary relevance in fieldwork-based research on tone in a language that is on the cusp of falling silent.

September 8

Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): A'ingae classifying subordination: Bracket erasure violations and a phasal strength solution

This paper presents and analyzes data from A’ingae (or Cofán, an Amazonian isolate, iso 639-3: con), where the patterns of stress and glottalization on verbs in subordinate clauses are sensitive to (i) the presence or absence of preglottalization on the subordinator, (ii) the lexical category of the subordinator, and (iii) the morphological structure of the inflected verb. The last of the three factors violates bracket erasure, an empirical generalization which states that phonological grammar cannot access morphological information from previous cycles (Kiparsky, 1982). To account for the A’ingae patterns, I introduce a family of phase-indexed faithfulness constraints. Like McPherson and Heath’s (2016) phase faithfulness, phase-indexed faithfulness allows for modeling cases where a previous cycle of phonological evaluation results in greater faithfulness to the evaluated material. The additional indexation allows for sensitivity to the previous phase’s syntactic category. At the theoretical core of this investigation lies the question of how much morphology is accessible to phonology. A’ingae data lend support to a model where phonological constraints can be indexed to syntactic labels, but fine-grained information about the morphosyntactic features present in a previous phase is unavailable.

September 15

Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): Morpheme-specific nasalization in Atchan

In this talk, I present the case of nasalization in Atchan [ebr, Kwa, Côte d'Ivoire] as a lens through which to examine the division of labor between phonology and morphology. Nasalization applies across morpheme boundaries in Atchan; however, the specific surface outcome depends on the identity of the triggering morpheme. Per the regular phonology of Atchan, the domain of nasalization typically includes only one segment to the right of the trigger. However, following a singular nasal subject pronoun, the domain of nasalization includes a much larger amount of material. I present two morpheme-specific patterns of nasalization in Atchan here: irregular nasalization of auxiliaries and non-local nasalization within serial verb constructions. While both patterns appear on the surface to be phonologically derivable, involving nasal harmony, I argue that, with a closer look at the domains they affect and the contexts in which they occur, their exceptionality is best accounted for morphologically. 

September 22

Jonathan Paramore (UC Santa Cruz): Codas are universally moraic

Abstract here

September 29

Alex Elias (UC Berkeley): Just because you can doesn’t mean you should: Two analyses of Jao’s phonemic inventory

Jao is an Oceanic language with a very large and typologically unusual consonant inventory. Of the roughly 45 consonant phonemes, 24 of them are nasalized, an extraordinarily high proportion. Meanwhile, phonemically nasal vowels are marginal. It is possible to dramatically reduce the size of the phoneme inventory and rescue nasal vowels from their marginal role by shifting the locus of nasality onto the vowels. Certain pairs of consonants like [p, pᵐ] and [ᵐb, m] would then be viewed as allophones conditioned by the nasality of the following vowel. My talk will examine these competing analyses and raise a deeper methodological question: just because something is possible, does that mean you should do it?

October 6

Noah Macey (UC Berkeley): A dynamic neural model of the interaction between social and lexical influences on speech production: the case of retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract here