Phonology

Stephen Anderson publishes second edition of Phonology in the Twentieth Century

Language Science Press has published a second edition of Emeritus Professor Steve Anderson’s celebrated monograph Phonology in the Twentieth Century (U Chicago Press 1985) — an important history of the development of phonological thinking over the course of the last century which taxonomises and contextualises the contributions of important theorists and tensions between “representational” and “rule-based” approaches to the sound structures of human language.

Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at LMU Munich

Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. The talk, entitled “Tone as gesture: space, time, perception and change” featured recent work in the Yale phonetics lab on lexical tone, including graduate student projects by Chris Geissler and Andy Zhang. The talk was a part of LMU’s MAMPF (Methods and approaches of modern phonetic research) series (link to talk series). Link to abstract.

Claire Bowern publishes in Diachronica

Claire Bowern is an author, headed by Jayden Macklin-Cordes and Erich Round (Ling PhD 2009) of a new study on phylogenetic signal in phonotactics. The paper uses data from Pama-Nyungan (Australian) languages to track the extent to which phoneme inventory characteristics (phoneme presence/absence, unigram and bigram frequency) show phylogenetic signal. This is relevant for claims that Australian languages do not show sound change. The paper is open access and supplementary materials are available.

Jason Shaw publishes in Language

Jason Shaw co-authored a paper published in Language. The paper, entitled “Phonological contrast and phonetic variation: The case of velars in Iwaidja”, presents a field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endanged Australian Aboriginal language. This study reveals how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast.

Several Yale linguists present at AMP 2020

Several phonologists are presenting at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2020.

Jason Shaw is presenting a paper co-authored with Sejin Oh (Yale-affiliated, at Haskins), Alexei Kochetov & Karthik Durvasula: “Distinguishing complex segments from consonant clusters using gestural coordination”

There are also three posters:

Sarah Babinski: “Intrinsic f0 and sound change: Evidence from Australian languages”,

Jason Shaw published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Jason Shaw co-authored a paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled “Effects of vowel coproduction on the timecourse of tone recognition”. The paper uses eye-tracking to assess whether vowel quality influences the perception of lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese. Although vowels and tones had been thought to be largely independent, recent work shows that tones have a small but consistent effect on the production of vowels (Shaw et al. 2016). This paper shows the perceptual relevance of that variation.

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