Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology, July 6-8, 2007, Stanford University

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Phonology studies the sound patterns of human languages. Sound patterns can sometimes emerge as quantitative tendencies and preferences. This can be illustrated by the following three examples. First, in American English, word-final "t" is sometimes deleted, more often before consonants ("west side") than before vowels ("west end"). Second, some sound combinations make better words than others. This can be seen in the dictionary where some sound combinations are statistically overrepresented, others underrepresented, as well as in psycholinguistic experiments where subjects judge some nonsense words to sound more natural than others ("stin" sounds more natural than "smy", which in turn is more natural than "bzharsk"). Third, word frequency influences phonological patterns. The low-frequency word "exploit" has initial stress as a noun, final stress as a verb, whereas the high-frequency word "express" has final stress under both readings. Phonological theory has traditionally focused on qualitative patterns. Quantitative phenomena, such as variation, gradient phonotactics and lexical frequency, have not figured prominently in theoretical discussion. This is changing. Quantitative studies are becoming common, partly because of new methodological developments (annotated corpora, sociolinguistic databases, searchable dialect archives, on-line dictionaries, experimental psycholinguistic data, new computational tools), partly because of new theoretical developments. This has broadened the empirical base of phonology and is likely to lead to new discoveries and connections to neighboring fields of inquiry. The three-day workshop on Variation, Gradience, and Frequency in Phonology will run concurrently with the 2007 Linguistic Institute at Stanford in July 2007. The goal is to facilitate the collaboration among phonologists seeking unified theoretical explanations for qualitative and quantitative patterns in phonology.