Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology

Last update: December 14, 2007
For questions or comments, please email dialect (at) stanford (dot) edu

6-8 July, 2007, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, U.S.A.

Workshop description:

This three-day workshop on Variation, Gradience, and Frequency in Phonology ran concurrently with the 2007 Linguistic Institute at Stanford in July 2007. The goal was to facilitate the collaboration among phonologists seeking unified theoretical explanations for qualitative and quantitative patterns in phonology. The workshop focused on three main topics:

Phonological variation
Gradient phonotactics
Lexical frequency effects

Phonology studies the sound patterns of human languages. Sound patterns sometimes emerge as quantitative tendencies and preferences. This can be illustrated by the following three examples. First, in American English, word-final t is variably deleted, more often before consonants (west side) than before vowels (west end). Second, some sound combinations make better words than others. This can be seen in the dictionary where some combinations are statistically overrepresented, others underrepresented, as well as in experiments where subjects judge some nonsense words to sound more natural than others (stin > smy > bzharsk). Third, word frequency influences phonological patterns. The low-frequency word exploit has initial stress as a noun, final stress as a verb, whereas the high-frequency word express has final stress under both readings.

Phonological theory has traditionally focused on qualitative patterns. Quantitative phenomena, such as variation, gradient phonotactics and lexical frequency effects, have not figured prominently in theoretical discussion. This is changing. Quantitative studies are becoming common, partly because of new methodological developments (annotated corpora, sociolinguistic databases, searchable dialect archives, on-line dictionaries, experimental psycholinguistic data, new computational tools), and partly because of new theoretical developments. This has broadened the empirical base of phonology and is likely to lead to new discoveries and connections to neighboring fields of inquiry.

Workshop Schedule:

Friday, July 6

7:30-8:30

Evening lecture: Paul Kiparsky, Stanford Univ. "Variation as a window on phonological structure"

Saturday, July 7

9:00-9:40	Bruce Hayes	UCLA	The analysis of gradience in phonology: What are the right tools?	slides
9:40-10:20	Gregory Guy	New York Univ.	The scope of generalization in phonology	slides
10:40-11:20	Michael Hammond	Univ. of Arizona	Typology, judgments, and weights	slides
11:20-12:00	Kie Zuraw with Kevin Ryan	UCLA	Frequency influences on phonological rule application within and across words
1:30-2:10	Andries Coetzee	Univ. of Michigan	A lexical theory of variation	slides
2:10-2:50	Joe Pater	Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst	Harmonic Grammar, Gradual Learning, and Phonological Gradience	handout
2:50-4:20	POSTER SESSION
4:20-5:00	Dan Jurafsky	Stanford Univ.	Predictability Effects on Content Versus Function Word Pronunciation in Conversational English

Sunday, July 8

9:00-9:40	Arto Anttila	Stanford Univ.	T-Orders and Variation	Slides	Handout
9:40-10:20	Marc van Oostendorp	Meertens Institute	Gradience, variability and the visibility of voicing in Dutch	slides
10:40-11:20	Yoonjung Kang	Univ. of Toronto	The frequency effects and regularization in Korean noun variations	handout
11:20-12:00	Adam Albright	MIT	Similarity, feature-based generalization, and bias in novel onset clusters	slides	handout
1:30-2:10	Betty Phillips	Indiana State Univ.	Frequency Effects in the Lexical Diffusion of Phonological Change	slides	bibliography
2:10-2:50	James Myers	National Chung Cheng Univ.	Frequency effects in lenition and the challenge of lexicalized markedness	slides
3:00-3:40	Paul Boersma	Univ. of Amsterdam	The evolution of phonotactic distributions in the lexicon	slides
3:50-4:50	Panel Discussion:
with:	Bruce Hayes, UCLA Norma Mendoza-Denton, Univ. of Arizona James McClelland, Stanford Univ. Paul Smolensky, Johns Hopkins, Smolensky's slides

Poster session

Young-ran An	SUNY Stony Brook	Identity avoidance In Korean reduplication	[PDF]
Diana Apoussidou	Universiteit van Amsterdam	Hidden variation as a result of learning: Is variation okay as long as you can't hear it?
Michael Becker	Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst	Learning stochastic grammars without stochastic rankings	poster	handout
Natalie Boll	Utrecht Institute Of Linguistics	Is gradient phonotactic knowledge lexical or grammatical? Evidence from a serial recall experiment	[PDF]
Walcir Cardoso	Concordia Univ.	Not everything that can be counted counts: Input frequency and markedness in the development of second language /s/ + consonant onset sequences	[PDF]
Lisa Davidson	New York Univ.	Why /znafe/ is easier to say than /pkamo/
Olga Dmitrieva	Stanford Univ.	Variation in pronunciation of geminate consonants in Russian	[PDF]
Maria Gouskova & Nancy Hall	New York Univ. & Univ. of Essex	Levantine Arabic vowel epenthesis: phonetics, phonology, and learning	[PDF]
Martin Hilpert	Rice Univ.	The English Comparative - Phonology and Usage	[PDF]
Karen Jesney	Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst	The locus of variation in weighted constraint grammars	[PDF]
Vsevolod Kapatsinski	Indiana Univ.	Does high frequency lead to automaticity? A corpus study.	[PDF]
James Kirby & Alan Yu	University of Chicago	Gradient and categorical constraints: evidence from Cantonese	[PDF]
Tracy Lennertz & Iris Berent	Florida Atlantic Univ.	Markedness constraints on the perception of s/z-initial onset clusters	[PDF]
Andrew Martin	UCLA	Grammars Leak: How categorical phonotactics can cause gradient phonotactics	[PDF]
Jennifer Nycz	New York Univ.	Two Repairs In One grammar? A unified OT account of obligatory epenthesis & variable t/d deletion in English	poster
Mary Pearce	SIL	ATR allophones or undershoot in Kera
Shinichiro Sano	Sophia Univ.	An Optimality-Theoretic account of Sa-insertion in Japanese	poster
Anne St-Amand	Univ. of Toronto	Intra-grammar variation and vowel deletion in Canadian French
Brent Vander Wyk & James L. McClelland	Stanford Univ.	Graded constraints on English word forms	[PDF]
Yuan Zhao	Stanford Univ.	Low Frequency Is Of High Frequency: Frequency Effect on Tonal Variations	[PDF]

Links:

The 2007 Linguistic Institute

Searchable Stanford Campus Map

Lauren Hall-Lew's home page

Arto Anttila's home page

This workshop is supported by the National Science Foundation under workshop number 0647250.