Talk by Hannah Sande (Georgetown University), Tuesday 21st, 4-6 pm

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, May 21, 4 – 6 pm in SH 5.105. Dr. Hannah Sande (Georgetown University) will present „Doubly morphologically conditioned phonology“. Abstract: Phonological alternations can be unconditioned, applying uniformly across a language, no matter the context. They can also be specific to particular morphological environments, like English velar softening (k-->s) before some /ɪ/-initial suffixes (-ism, -ity) but not others (-ish, -ing). Numerous frameworks have been proposed to model morphologically conditioned phonology: Exception features (Chomsky and Halle 1968), Lexical Morphology and Phonology (Kiparsky 1982), Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2000, 2008), Indexed Constraint Theory (Ito and Mester 1995, 1999; Pater 2010), Cophonology Theory (Orgun 1996; Inkelas 1998; Inkelas and Zoll 2005, 2007). In this talk I present data from two understudied languages, Sacapultec (Mayan) and Guébie (Kru), showing that phonological alternations can not only by triggered by the presence of a single morpheme, but they can also be...
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Talk by Yranahan Traore and Annie Rialland, Wednesday 15th, 4-6 pm

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium, which will take place on Wednesday, May 15, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Yranahan Traore and Annie Rialland will give a talk on „Spreading rules and nominal tonology in Tagbana“. The talk discusses new insights about the the phonology of tones in Tagbana. The language has a rich system of lexical and grammatical tones. Floating tones are complicating the distribution of tones. We will see that spreading tones are important for a formal account of the distribution of high, low and mid tones. You are cordially invited!...
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Talk by Fenna Bergsma, Monday 13th, 5-6 pm

We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, May 13, 5 (sharp) – 6 pm in IG 254. Fenna Bergsma will present „The 2SG pronoun in Frisian“. Abstract: It has been argued (cf. Postma 2013) that the Frisian 2SG pronoun has different forms dependent on its position with respect to the verb. Preverbally, the pronoun do is used. Postverbally, the clitics -o/-e are possible or the pronoun can be dropped. (1) a. Do  sjochst him.           you see       him           'You see him.' b. Sjochst -o/-e/∅ him?     see         you       him     'Do you see him?' This observation is used as a basis to argue that preverbal and postverbal pronouns have different positions in the syntax, and that they spell out different part of the syntactic structure. I will argue that the description in (1) is incorrect, removing the basis to assume different syntactic objects are realized. I show that Frisian has, preverbally and postverbally, do as a full...
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