Phonetics Seminar (Ling. 260)

Fall 2009

Campbell 2101K

Mondays 4-6

Monday, September 28	Organizational Meeting
Monday, October 5 USC Linguistics Colloquium Series Note Special time: 3-4:30	Larry Hyman, U.C. Berkeley, "Do tones have features? Or: Is tone different?" Unless explicitly concerned with developing a system of features per se, most studies of tonal phonology refer to contrasting high, mid, low and contour tones as H, M, L, HL, LH (etc.), rather than with features such as [±upper], [±raised]. Since this practice stands in marked contrast to vowel and consonant phonology, where features seem unavoidable, it is natural to ask whether this is due simply to convenience or whether tones lend themselves less naturally to a featural interpretation than vowels and consonants. In this talk I suggest that this is indeed the case: while they sometimes allow a general and insightful account, there are inconsistencies, indeterminacies, and other reasons to doubt the value of tonal features (and tonal geometry). This then naturally leads to a more general question: Why should tone be different? In Hyman (in press), I provide evidence to suggest that tone is different in its capabilities: tone can do everything that segmental and metrical phonology can do, but the reverse is not true. I start by illustrating some examples to make this point then turn to the question of how this provides insight into the relative unimportance of featural analyses of tone. In the course of the talk I also raise the question of why tone, which might seem like a good bet, is not a linguistic universal (as compared to consonants and vowels). Since some tonal phenomena have no segmental or stress analogues, I argue that anyone who is interested in the outer limits of what is possible in phonology would be well-served to understand how tone systems work
Monday, October 12	Pat Keating, Marc Garellek & Grace Kuo EMU
Monday, October 19	Poster Presentations for ASA (Chad, Jaime, Marc, Nancy & Pat)
Monday, October 26	No meeting due to the Acoustical Society of America
Monday, November 2	Differences in airstream and posterior place of articulation among Nuu clicks Amanda L. Miller, Johanna Brugman, Bonny Sands, Levi Namaseb, Mats Exter and Chris Collins Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Volume 39, Issue 02, August 2009, pp 129-161
Monday, November 9	(cancelled)
Monday, November 16	Sunhee Kim
Monday, November 23	Grace Kuo
Monday, November 30	Chad Vicenik

If you have any questions or would like to give a talk, please contact Megha Sundara.