Phonology

Recent alumnus Luke Lindemann has published a paper entitled “When Wurst comes to Wurscht: Variation and koiné formation in Texas German.” Luke’s paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Linguistic Geography. It discusses dialect emergence and leveling, and focuses on the variation between [s] and [ʃ] (sh) sounds in certain contexts in Texas German.

Many students, faculty, and alumni of Yale linguistics, as well as colleagues from nearby Haskins Laboratories, presented their work at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month. They contributed at least 14 talks and posters to the conference and enjoyed a full week of presentations about phonetics, connecting with colleagues and friends from all over the world. 

Rikker Dockum and Claire Bowern have a new paper in the open access journal Language Documentation and Description, entitled “Swadesh lists are not long enough: Drawing phonological generalizations from limited data.” They look at the amount of data (e.g. number of words in a wordlist) required to accurately recover phonological inventory distributional generalizations and show that the typical 100-word or 200-word Swadesh lists frequently used by linguists are not usually sufficient.

This past weekend (June 21-23), the 5th Workshop on Sound Change (WSC 5) took place at UC Davis. Yale Linguistics was represented by Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and graduate student Sarah Babinski, who all presented at the workshop. Claire Bowern gave a talk entitled “Language, Culture, and Australian Exceptionalism,” while Rikker and Sarah gave posters.

Prof. Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences. The title of the talk was “Phonological control of time”. In it, he presented how the theory of Articulatory Phonology accounts for language-specific patterns of speech timing and two new challenges for the theory.

Many members of the Yale linguistics department made a mass exodus to the the recent LSA annual meeting in New York City, where they gave 19 oral and poster presentations at the main meeting, workshops, and sister society meetings. These included:

Jason has published an article in the Association for Laboratory Phonology’s journal and presented a talk at its annual meeting.

Jason Shaw, Chris Geissler, and Samuel Andersson spoke about various topics in phonetics and phonology at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.

The two graduate students spoke about syntax in Choctaw and prosody in Southern East Cree, respectively.

Graduate students Sarah Babinski and Samuel Andersson and PhD candidate Chris Geissler discussed the relationship between phonology and phonetics.

Claire and Rikker showcased their results from the Pama-Nyungan Laboratory at the Association for Linguistic Typology.

Sarah traveled to Montreal to speak about stress assignment in Southern East Cree.

Rikker talked about how tonal systems change over time, using statistical analysis on a large dataset he compiled to identify a strong phylogenetic signal.

Jim Wood, Matt Barros, and Matt Tyler presented two talks and a poster.

Yale-affiliated linguists showcased seven different presentations—more than any other university.