For online participation, please sign up by 12 January: https://forms.gle/hPETVsxqrTz3GWFg9
Handouts and slides: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gdHRhoehIBKAnqPygFMIUVZ1DfDycSYj...
We are pleased to announce the OCP23 Satellite Workshop on The Role of Representation in Computational Phonology to be held on 13 January at King's College (University of Cambridge). The workshop is free of charge, but we cannot accommodate more than 40 people. We therefore ask you to contact Yury Makarov for confirmation of your place beforehand.
Phonological representations minimally assume linearly ordered elements, and have been augmented to include hierarchical structure like prosodic categories and non-linear structure like autosegmental tiers. McCarthy’s (1988:84) often quoted adage, “if the representations are right, then the rules will follow” implies the analytic advantage of representations other than strings. This workshop explores their computational consequences.
To give an illustrative example, Slovenian bans [+anterior] stridents before [−anterior] stridents, Slovenian bans [+anterior] stridents before [−anterior] stridents, e.g., [sl-ux] ‘hearing’ [ʃl-iʃ-i] *[sl-iʃ-i] ‘hears’ (Jurgec, 2011:330). This can be modeled by projecting a tier of stridents and banning adjacent segments that disagree in the feature [anterior], e.g., [ʃl-iʃ-i] → [ʃʃ], *[sl-iʃ-i] → *[sʃ]. This approach straightforwardly captures blocking effects by intervening coronal stops, e.g., [sit] ‘full’ [na-sit-iʃ] ‘(you) feed’ (Jurgec, 2011:331), by projecting them onto the tier: [na-sit-iʃ] → [stʃ]. Unsurprisingly, strident affricates participate in harmony, e.g., [ʦepəʦ] ‘foot’ [ʧepʧək] ‘fool-DIM’ (Jurgec, 2011:330). However, if affricates were interpreted as clusters, it would not be possible to model these alternations by banning strings on a projected tier, illustrating an interaction between phonological representations and computational complexity (see Lamont, 2023 for more examples along these lines). Previous work has shown that adopting autosegmental representations reduces the complexity of tonotactics (Jardine, 2016) and that adopting feet reduces the complexity of stress (Koser, 2022), providing computational support for these representations.
We invite abstracts for workshop talks on the role representations from traditional phonological theory play in computational phonology and how computational approaches can inform traditional views of representation. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Phenomena whose analyses are made simpler/more complex by adopting different representations
- The role of learnability (e.g., Gouskova and Stanton, 2021; Lee et al., 2023) and what structures should/must be encoded in UG
- Equivalences between different representations (e.g., Strother-Garcia, 2019; Jardine et al., 2021)
We especially encourage submissions that discuss novel data sets and/or representations that are not widely assumed in the phonological literature. Submissions do not need to be couched in model theory/formal language theory; we invite perspectives from various theoretical backgrounds.
References
Gouskova, Maria and Juliet Stanton (2021). Learning complex segments. Language 97(1). 151–193.
Jardine, Adam (2016). Locality and non-linear representations in tonal phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware.
Jardine, Adam, Nick Danis and Luca Iacoponi (2021). A formal investigation of Q-Theory in comparison to Autosegmental Representations. Linguistic Inquiry 52(2). 333–358.
Jurgec, Peter (2011). Feature spreading 2.0: A unified theory of assimilation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tromsø.
Koser, Nate (2022). The computational nature of stress assignment. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Lamont, Andrew (2023). Phonotactics conspire to reduce computational complexity. Unpublished manuscript, University College London. Available at https://aphonologist.github.io/papers.
Lee, Seung Suk, Alessa Farinella, Cerys Hughes and Joe Pater (2023). Learning stress with feet and grids. In Noah Elkins, Bruce Hayes, Jinyoung Jo and Jian-Leat Siah (eds.), Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Washington, D.C.: Linguistic Society of America. https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v10i0.5441.
McCarthy, John J. (1988). Feature geometry and dependency: A review. Phonetica 45. 84–108.
Strother-Garcia, Kristina (2019). Using model theory in phonology: A novel characterization of syllable structure and syllabification. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware.
