February 26, 2013

Guest Speaker: Daniel Currie Hall (March 1/2013)

Speaker: Daniel Currie Hall (Saint Mary's University)

Title: Contrast and redundancy: What does phonology know, and when?

Time: Friday, March 1, 3pm

Place: Sid Smith 560A

Abstract:

It has often been observed that the contrastive or redundant status of a feature (on a particular segment, in a particular language) is relevant to how that feature behaves phonologically. There is less agreement, however, as to precisely how contrastiveness exerts its influence. This talk addresses two crucial pieces of this puzzle. First, how are features identified as contrastive or redundant? I argue that a set of contrastive feature specifications for a given inventory must be (a) one that is sufficient to differentiate all the phonemes in the inventory and (b) one in which every feature that is assigned serves to mark some phonemic distinction. I contrast this with a narrower definition of contrast based on minimal differences between phonemes, and show that the broader definition allows for a stronger claim about the importance of contrast: Only contrastive features are visible to the phonological computation. This point is illustrated with examples of vowel patterns in Uyghur, Inuktitut, and Anii. Second, what is the role of non-contrastive features? Here, I examine data from Yowlumne Yokuts to argue that phonology must be able to insert redundant feature values into representations, but that it does not need to be able to see those feature values once it has done so.

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