Ling 52400 Phonological typology
Professor: Alan Yu [jy]
Office: Classics 309
Office hours: Monday 10-noon and by appointment
E-mail: aclyu@uchicago.edu
Website: home.uchicago.edu/~aclyu
Course website: http://washo.uchicago.edu/seminar/ling52400.html
Description
Why are some phonological patterns common, while others are rare or nonexistent? Two factors are
commonly identified as the main culprits of differential phonologization: pattern selectivity, where
cognitive biases make certain patterns difficult or impossible to acquire even from perfect training data;
and phonetic precursor robustness, where the intrinsic frequency and subtlety of a phonetic precursor
play a decisive role in the likelihood of phonologization. In the final analysis, an adequate theory of
phonological typology and phonologization will likely have to recognize the contributions of both factors.
In this seminar, we will read papers that approach this topic. After a few sessions of lecture-anddiscussion to set the stage, we’ll move to student-led discussions of readings, with occasional lectures.
Course requirement
 Attendance and participation in class (15%)
 Several in-class presentations (25%)
 Final project (60%)
o Database and bibliography
o Final paper
Database project and the final paper
The goal of the final project is to determine (and, hopefully, explain) what the valid cross-linguistic
generalizations are concerning tone. For this, we will co-construct a database against which claimed
generalizations regarding tones can be tested (and others ones perhaps discovered!). The ultimate goal is
to develop a web-accessible (a) database and (b) bibliography of reported cases of tonal patterns; see
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~ehume/metathesis/ for an excellent example of such a database).
Each seminar participant who’s registered for course credit is required to assemble a typological database
and a bibliography on one of the following topics. (The database and un-annotated bibliography should be
completed by Week 7.)
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Tone-Consonant Interaction
Tone-Duration Interaction (sans contour tone-duration interaction)
Tone-Stress Interaction
Tone-Tone Interaction
Tone-Vowel Quality Interaction
For the final paper, each seminar participant will investigate a specific subtype of tonal patterns, map out
its typology and discuss possible explanations for the typology. You may team up with one of your
classmates in constructing the database. However, you must turn in separate final papers. If the database
ends up to be too big, you might focus on a specific language group, since even closely related dialects
can have quite different tonal properties.
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Course schedule (subject to change)
Week 1: LSA annual meeting —no class
Week 2: Perspectives on typology and universals
Required:
Blevins, Juliette. To appear. A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology. Theoretical Linguistics.
Blevins, Juliette. To appear. Reply to commentaries. Theoretical Linguistics.
Kiparsky, Paul. To appear. Amphichronic linguistics vs. Evolutionary Phonology. Theoretical Linguistics.
Recommended:
Iverson, Gregory K. and Joseph C. Salmons. To appear. On the typology of final laryngeal neutralization:
Evolutionary Phonology and Laryngeal Realism. Theoretical Linguistics.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2004. Universals constrain change, change results in typological generalizations. Ms.
Stanford University.
Myers, Scott. 2002. Gaps in factorial typology: The case of voicing in consonant clusters. Ms. University
of Texas, Austin.
Steriade, Donca. 1997. Phonetics in phonology: the case of laryngeal neutralization. Ms. UCLA.
Week 3: Typologyfest
Moreton, Elliott. Submitted. Underphonologization and modularity bias.
Moreton, Elliott (2006). Phonotactic learning and phonological typology. Presentation at the 37th meeting
of the Northeast Linguistics Society, Urbana, Illinois, October 13-15, 2006.
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Compensatory lengthening
Consonant harmony
Contour tone distribution
Dissimilation
Nasal harmony
Place assimilation
Rounding harmony
Week 4: Phonologization
Required:
Hyman, Larry. 1976. Phonologization. In Alphonse Juilland (ed.), Linguistic studies offered to Joseph
Greenberg on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Saratoga: Anma Libri. 107-118.
Kingston, John. In press. The phonetics-phonology interface. In Paul de Lacy (ed.), Handbook of
Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ohala, J. J. 1983. The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. In: P. F. MacNeilage (ed.), The
production of speech. New York: Springer-Verlag. 189 - 216.
Recommended:
Kingston, John. 2005. The phonetics of Athabaskan tonogenesis. In S. Hargus and K. Rice (eds.),
Athabaskan prosody. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hyman, Larry. 2001. Tone systems. In Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.), Language typology and language
universals: An international handbook, vol. 2. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. 1367-1380.
Hyman, Larry & R.G. Schuh. 1974. Universals of tone rules: evidence from West Africa. Linguistic
Inquiry 5: 81–115.
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Week 5: Direct phoneticism Part I
Required:
Hayes, Bruce. 1999. Phonetically-Driven Phonology: The Role of Optimality Theory and Inductive
Grounding. In Michael Darnell, Edith Moravscik, Michael Noonan, Frederick Newmeyer, and
Kathleen Wheatly (eds.), Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics, Volume I: General Papers.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 243-285.
Hayes, Bruce and Tanya Stivers. 1995. The Phonetics of Post-Nasal Voicing. Ms. UCLA.
Pater, Joe. 1999. Austronesian Nasal Substitution and Other NC Effects. In René Kager, Harry van der
Hulst, and Wim Zonneveld (eds.), The Prosody Morphology Interface. Cambridge University Press.
310-343.
Steriade, Donca. 2001. The phonology of perceptibility effects: the P-map and its consequences for
constraint organization. Ms., MIT.
Recommended:
Hayes, Bruce and Donca Steriade. 2004. Introduction: The phonetic bases of phonological markedness. In
Bruce Haye, Robert Kirchner, and Donca Steriade (eds.), Phonetically based phonology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 1-33.
Week 6: Phonologization vs. Direct phoneticism
Required:
Hale, Mark and Charles Reiss. 2000. ‘Substance abuse’ and ‘dysfunctionalism’: Current trends in
phonology. Linguistic inquiry 31: 157-169.
Barnes, Jonathan Allen. 2002. Positional neutralization: A phonologization approach to typological
patterns. PhD dissertation. University of California, Berkeley. Chapter 2.
Crosswhite, Katherine. 2004. Vowel reduction. In Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner, and Donca Steriade
(eds.), Phonetically based phonology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 191-231.
Flemming, Edward. (Submitted). A phonetically-based model of phonological vowel reduction.
Recommended:
Kawahara, Shigeto .2006. A faithfulness scale projected from a perceptibility scale: The case of [+voice]
in Japanese. Language 82.3: 536-574.
Week 7: Tonefest
Presentation of databases
Week 8: Learning bias and markedness
Required:
Moreton, Elliott. 2002. Structural constraints in the perception of English stop-sonorant clusters.
Cognition 84: 55-71.
Moreton, Elliott (2006). Phonotactic learning and phonological typology. Presentation at the 37th meeting
of the Northeast Linguistics Society, Urbana, Illinois, October 13-15, 2006.
Seidl, Amanda and Gene Buckley. 2005. On the learning of arbitrary phonological rules. Language
Learning and Development 1(3&4), 289-316.
Wilson, Colin. To appear. Learning Phonology with Substantive Bias: An Experimental and
Computational Study of Velar Palatalization. Cognitive Science.
Recommended:
Anttila, Arto and Young-mee Yu Cho. 1998. Variation and change in optimality theory. Lingua 104: 3156.
Moreton, Elliott. Submitted. Underphonologization and modularity bias.
Wilson, Colin. 2003. Experimental Investigation of Phonological Naturalness. WCCFL 22 Proceedings.
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Zuraw, Kie. 2005. The role of phonetic knowledge in phonological patterning: Corpus and survey
evidence from Tagalog. Ms. UCLA.
Week 9: Evolution and self-organization
Required:
de Boer, Bart. 2000. Self-organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics 28: 441-465.
Harrison, K. David, Mark Dras, and Berk Kapicioglu. 2002. Agent-Based Modeling of the Evolution of
Vowel Harmony. NELS 32.
Wedel, Andy. 2006. Exemplar models, evolution and language change. The Linguistic Review 23(3): 247274.
Recommended:
Dras, Mark and David Harrison. 2003. Emergent Behavior in Phonological Pattern Change. In
Proceedings of Artificial Life VIII.
Kochetov, Alexei. To appear. Self-organization through misperception: Secondary articulation and vowel
contrasts in language inventories. In Peter Avery, Elan Dresher, and Keren Rice (eds.), Contrast in
phonology: Perception and acquisition. Mouton de Gruyter.
Week 10: Student presentations
Presentation of student papers
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