Pending final approval, the Department of Linguistics invites applications
from scholars with expertise and research interests in any aspect of Middle
Eastern languages and linguistics. We are seeking a Ph.D. in any subfield
of linguistics or a related discipline who has analyzed primary data (e.g.,
experimental data, field data, or natural language corpora) in order to
address theoretical issues with a focus on the languages of the Middle East,
including but not limited to Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Persian. This is a
tenure-eligible position at the rank of Assistant Professor, to begin in
fall 2009.
The Linguistics Department is participating in a multi-departmental search;
thus there is the opportunity for a joint hire with another department.

Applicants should submit a curriculum vita, a letter describing research and
teaching interests, two writing samples, and three letters of reference.
Review of applications will begin on October 15th, 2008.

E-mail inquiries should be directed to linguistics@northwestern.edu.
The web page for the Department is:
http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/linguistics.

Please send all materials to:

Middle East Faculty Search Committee
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208-4090
(Tel: 847-491-7020, Fax: 847-491-3770)

Letters of reference can be sent electronically (to the email above), or by
mail (to the mailing address above) by October 15, 2008.

Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer,
and applications from minority and women candidates are especially welcome.

OK, I’m kidding. No, not about that last bit — it’s true that I have no such intention — but about the e-mail barrage. Exactly two people wrote (evidence for binarity?), and neither one of them was Ed (which was surprising, because he has apparently not had anything better to do). I guess the remaining mass of readers relies on the RSS feed and don’t visit the blog directly, so they didn’t even notice we were down. (Should we post more often? Nah, this isn’t Language Log, just all things phonology.)

Anyway, the deal is that the security of our server (camba.ucsd.edu) was somehow compromised by comment spam and the like. This came to the attention of the systems security folks at UCSD, who brought it to the attention of the Linguistics computing staff — big thanks and props to Ezra van Everbroeck and even more to Marc Silver for doing what it took to bring things back online quickly and safely. If you notice anything that doesn’t seem to have survived the change-over intact, please let me know and I’ll take care of it if I can (or I’ll very politely ask Marc and Ezra for help if I can’t).

Dates: September 11 and 12, 2008

The phonetic difference between b and p, or z and s has been described as a difference in (timing of) vocal fold vibration, but it well-known that there are subtle differences in the precise implementation of ‘voicing’, as well as its function in the phonologies of the world’s languages. This workshop brings together researchers who study the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, both theoretical and empirical, and both synchronic and diachronic. What’s the right phonological interpretation of voicing? How does it interact with other phonological features? How do phonological processes involving voice — such as intervocalic voicing, devoicing and voicing assimilation — interact with other phonological processes?

The workshop takes place in Amsterdam and Leiden. The last talk is a Dutch-style inaugural address, followed by a party, which is open to participants in the workshop. Participation is free; but please announce your presence beforehand to marc.van.oostendorp@meertens.knaw.nl.

The full programme and other details are here.

Sixth Old World Conference in Phonology

22-24 JANUARY 2009
Deadline for abstracts: 15th September 2008

Invited speakers:
B. Elan Dresher (University of Toronto)
Jennifer Hay (University of Canterbury)
Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens Instituut & Leiden University)

The conference will be preceded by a workshop on subsegmental phonology on 21st January, organised by Bert Botma (Leiden) and Patrick Honeybone (Edinburgh), with the title “the Privative Project: is it still worth pursuing?” Those attending the conference will be very welcome to attend the workshop, too. (Further details of the workshop are to follow.)

Conference website: www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ocp6

OCP homepage: www.ocp.leidenuniv.nl

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CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

The department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh is proud to announce that the sixth Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP6) will take place in Edinburgh from 22nd to 24th January 2009. OCP6 is organised by a group of phonologists at Edinburgh, and it follows in the line of previous OCP conferences, which have been held in Leiden, Tromsø, Budapest, Rhodes and Toulouse. Abstracts for consideration for presentation as either talks or poster papers at the conference are now invited.

The conference will be preceded by a semi-separate workshop entitled “the Privative Project: is it still worth pursuing?” This workshop is organised by Bert Botma (Leiden) and Patrick Honeybone (Edinburgh) and further details will be available soon. Abstracts addressing issues related to the workshop theme will be welcome at the main conference, but there is no conference theme for OCP6 at all, and abstracts on any phonological issue (theoretical or empirical) in any language(s) and in any phonological framework are invited, as are abstracts which deal with connections between phonology and psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics.

————————

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

This is a summary - please consult the website for full details
www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ocp6

• There is no obligatory conference theme - abstracts can be submitted on anything. Abstracts should be sent to Patrick Honeybone as attachments to an email (patrick.honeybone@ed.ac.uk) by 15th September 2008.
• Abstracts should be no longer than one side of A4, with 2.5cm or one inch margins, single-spaced, with a font size no smaller than 12, and with normal character spacing.
• Please send two copies of your abstract - one of these should be anonymous and one should include your name, affiliation and email address at the top of the page, directly below the title. All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by members of the organising committee.
• Please use one of these formats for your abstract: pdf, Word, or plain text. If you need to use a phonetic font in your abstract, either embed it in a pdf file, or use the Doulos SIL font.
• Full papers will last around 25 minutes with around 5 minutes for questions, and we also have plans for a high-profile poster session. Please indicate whether you would prefer to present your work only as an oral paper or a poster, or whether you would be prepared to present it in either form.
• If you need technical equipment for your talk, please say so in the message accompanying your abstract and we will do our best to provide it, although this cannot be guaranteed.
• We aim to finalise the programme, and to contact abstract-senders by around 31st March.

Further important details concerning abstract submission are available on the conference website - please make sure that you consult these before submitting an abstract: www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ocp6

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CONTACT DETAILS

The main organiser for OCP6 is Patrick Honeybone. If you would like to attend or if you have any queries about the conference, please feel free to get in touch (patrick.honeybone@ed.ac.uk).

Local phonological team:
Heinz Giegerich
Patrick Honeybone
Bob Ladd
April McMahon
Mits Ota
Bert Remijsen
Alice Turk

“Tatamagouche” is a small town in Nova Scotia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatamagouche,_Nova_Scotia). The similar “Tatamagouchi” appears in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968, 114) as an example word, as part of the data justifying a phonological rule that assigns secondary stress in long words.

A Google search on “Tatamagouchi” yields mostly works in phonological theory addressing English stress assignment. I conjecture, therefore, that Chomsky and Halle made a spelling mistake in SPE (or used an archaic spelling) which has since been carried forward by other phonologists, myself included. Cheers, Bruce Hayes

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Dear colleague,

We would like to invite you to the 10th National Congress / 4th International Congress of Phonetics and Phonology, which will take place during the period of November 24 - 26 (2008), at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).

This event is sponsored by the Brazilian Society of Phonetics and it counts with the support of several national and international phoneticians and phonologists.

The general theme of the congress is ”Phonetics and Phonology: Theory and Application”, but we also expect the following sub-themes: (1) Phonetics and Phonology within current theoretical perspectives; (2) Phonetics and Phonology in teaching: Literacy and the teaching of foreign languages; (3) Phonetics and Phonology in linguistic research: Prosody, description of languages, and diachronic phonetic and phonological processes; (4) Interdisciplinary Phonetics and Phonology: Speech pathology and speech synthesis and recognition; and (5) Experimental Phonetics: Current research.

We hope you will be able to participate and/or publicize this event to colleagues and students. For more information: (1) visit the site of the Brazilian Society of Phonetics; (2) e-mail mtmatta@terra.com.br; (3) or phone 21-2522-8881 or 21-9334-5457.

Profª Drª Mirian da Matta Machado
Presidente da SBF

The publisher’s website also includes this sample chapter (Chapter 1, “What is I-language?” — a good place to start), which begins with an autobiographical story about how Charles used his knowledge of Turkish vowels and vowel harmony to save himself and a friend from a near-death experience (hey, read it yourself).

I just so happened to be reading (John Mepham’s translation of) Roman Jakobson’s Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (that’s the image of a French version off to the right; I couldn’t find an image of my English version). There’s some good discussion of Turkish vowels and phonological features/oppositions there (pp. 79-83 of my English version) which I quote in full here.

Let us try to analyse an example. The vocalic system of the Turkish language is comprised of eight phonemes:

o	a	ö	e
u	y	ü	i

These eight phonemes produce, following the mathematical formula for combinations, twenty-eight distinctions, thus twenty eight binary relations. Ferdinand de Saussure showed us that the phoneme is constituted solely of relations. Now if we follow this Saussurian tradition and take these twenty-eight distinctions as the primary values for Turkish and take the phoneme in itself as secondary and derived, then we are in danger of arriving at a paradoxical conclusion, namely that the number of primary values is much higher than that of the derived values: twenty-eight compared with eight! Thus we are apparently confronted with a second contradiction — the first, remember, being that the ‘opposition’ between phonemes does not conform to the logical rules of opposition.

To remove both contradictions with one stroke it is enough simply to give up one presupposition which it has become traditional to make and which has threatened to lead all phonological research into error. We have been taught that phonemic oppositions, and above all the phoneme as such, are not decomposable. Taking the lead from Baudouin de Courtenay and Saussure, phonological research has accepted the following definition as its starting point: ‘The phoneme is a phonological element which is not susceptible to subdivision into smaller and simpler phonological elements’. Now, this definition (which was submitted twelve years ago to the first Phonological Assembly, in our ‘Project for a standardised phonological terminology’, and which was adopted by that international meeting) has turned out to be incorrect. In the Turkish phonological system the vowels o, a, ö, e are opposed to the vowels u, y, ü, i as open phonemes to closed phonemes; the vowels o, u, a, y are opposed to the vowels ö, ü, e, i as back phonemes to front phonemes, and the vowels o, u, ö, ü are opposed to the vowels a, y, e, i as rounded phonemes to unrounded phonemes. In this way the alleged twenty-eight vocalic oppositions of Turkish can in fact be reduced to three basic oppositions: (1) openness and closure, (2) back and front, (3) roundness and unroundness. It is by means of these three pairs of differential elements, really non-decomposable this time, that the eight vocalic phonemes of Turkish are formed. Thus, for example, the Turkish phoneme i is a complex entity composed of the three following differential elements: closed, front, unrounded.

The reasons why we have just characterised the differential elements in terms which pertain to the act of phonation are firstly because these terms are more familiar, and secondly because the corresponding acourstic definitions, while they would be more appropriate as a way of indicating the salient features of the qualities in question, would stand in need of some explanation, and this would take too much of our time at present. So we will do no more now than emphasise that each differential element exhibits one clear and easily identifiable acoustic feature, and that in analysing phonation precisely in the light of this acoustic effect we are always in a position to separate out from the multitude of phonatory movements a single basic factor which produces the acoustic effect in question.

It is not only the differences between the vocalic phonemes of Turkish which are resolvable into simple and indivisible binary oppositions, but all the differences between all the phonemes of every language. It follows that all the phonemes of each particular langauge, both the vowels and the consonants, can be dissociated into non-decomposable distinctive features. The apparent contradictions are now removed. The oppositions of such differential qualities are real binary oppositions, as defined in logic, i.e., they are such that each of the terms of the opposition necessarily implies its opposite. Thus, the idea of closure is opposed only by the idea of openness; the front and back features mutually imply each other, and so on.

The relation between two phonemes, by contrast, is complex and may be made up of several simple oppositions. Thus in Turkish the distinction between the phonemes u and o is made up of only a single opposition, that between closure and openness; but the distinction between the phonemes u and a is made up in addition of the opposition between the features roundness and unroundness, and the distinction between the phonemes u and e includes, in addition to the oppositions already mentioned, a third one, that between the features back and front. In any given language the number of differences between the phonemes is obviously greater than the number of phonemes, whereas the number of distinctive features is considerably lower. We should recall that the differential elements, while they serve to distinguish between the meanings of the words, do not themselves have meanings, and that it is precisely the fact that these empty entities are limited in number, that there are few of them in each given language, which enables the members of each linguistic community to perceive them, to retain them in memory and to put them to use.

The ‘differential elements’ (or in other terms ‘distinctive qualities or properties’, or finally ‘distinctive features’) appear in language combined in bundles. The phoneme is a bundle of differential elements. But the differential elements have in themselves their own role in the organisation of languages; they operate in language in an autonomous manner. For example, we find in many languages different forms of what is called ‘vowel harmony’. In such languages all the vowels of a word must have a common distinctive quality. For example in the majority of Turkic languages front and back vowels cannot appear together within a word: the vowels are either all front or all back; in Turkish the plural suffix takes the form -ler following a root with a front vowel, and the form -lar if the root has a back vowel: thus, ev-ler ‘houses’ and at-lar ‘horses’. So the front-back opposition operates here in an autonomous manner. In Turkic languages there is moreover a labial vowel harmony: in these languages rounded vowels cannot go together within a word with unrounded vowels. Finally, there are certain languages, for example those of the Manchu group, which do not allow closed and open vowels to both appear within the same word. For example, in Gold, a language of the Amur river region, the closed vowels u-y-i are opposed to the open vowels o-a-e: thus, ga ‘to buy’, bi ‘to exist’, and ga-pogo ‘in order to buy’, bi-pugu ‘in order to exist’. In all cases like this, one of the differential elements takes on an autonomous function, abstracting from the various phonemes of which the element is a part.

Note: the title of this post is for Ed.

1. Prosodic Alignment at the Word Level
   • Nov. 20-21, 2008
   • Mannheim, Germany
   • This specialized workshop is on alignment, with focus on word-internal morphological and prosodic constituents.
   • Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2008
2. Insertions and Deletions in Speech
   • Mar. 4, 2009
   • Osnabrück, Germany
   • This workshop will provide a forum for phonologists, phoneticians, and morphologists to discuss the forms and functions of deletions and insertions found cross-linguistically, as well as their consequences for phonological systems.
   • Call Deadline: Sept. 1, 2008
3. Rhythm Beyond the Word
   • March 4-6, 2008
   • Osnabrück, Germany
   • The goal of [this workshop] is to bring together researchers who focus on the role of rhythm in various subdomains of linguistics. We invite contributions from scholars working in morphology, phonology and syntax, psycho- and neurolinguistics, aphasiology and language acquisition.
   • Call Deadline: Sept. 1, 2008