March 25, 2021

Research Groups: Friday, March 26

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Group discussion led by Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.) of a paper: D'Onofrio, Annette (forthcoming). Age-based perceptions of a reversing regional sound change. Journal of Phonetics, 86.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Marjorie Leduc (MA): "Vowel harmony in Karajá."

This talk will present a preliminary OT analysis of Karajá’s ATR harmony accounting for the regressive properties of the pattern as well as the icy target behaviour of the high vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, which harmonize to [i] and [u], but then block harmony from proceeding past them. This contrasts with underlying /i/ and /u/, which are trigger to the harmony process, creating a distinction between underlying and derived vowel behaviour which can be difficult to deal with in surface-oriented frameworks like OT.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Semantics Research Group
Laurestine Bradford (MA): "Using communicative need to predict colexification in CLICS-3."

There is a cross-linguistic tendency for the more complex systems of vocabulary to be the ones with the most communicative power (Kemp, Xu, and Regier, 2017). Recently, a new cross-linguistic and cross-domain tool, that can help test such generalizations about vocabulary, was published: the third edition of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS3; Rzymski, Tresoldi, et al., 2019). Using this, we can ask to what extent communicative efficiency predicts amounts of colexification. That is, do languages colexify more words in domains that are less often needed? In my project, I attempt to compare the frequency of selected domains, in different languages' corpora, with the amount of domain-internal colexification attested in CLICS3. I will explain some of the theoretical and practical issues that have come up so far, as I attempt to quantify amounts of colexification and make use of potentially noisy data.

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