The next talk of the McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series is next week. The talk will be given by Dr. Heather Newell (Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)) on Friday, January 19th at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680, room 1041 (10th floor).
Heather is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Heather before the talk next Friday, please email me with your availability so that we can schedule accordingly.
The title and abstract for the talk is as follows:
An examination of the non-phonological nature of the Prosodic Hierarchy
In this talk I will discuss various themes in my recent work that call into question the reality of the Prosodic Hierarchy as a cognitive object (at the Phonological Word and above). I will compare the behaviour of the Prosodic Hierarchy with the behaviour of other phonological structures, and with syntactic structure-building; it will be demonstrated that the Prosodic Hierarchy behaves like neither. Alternative autosegmental analyses of phenomena whose descriptions regularly appeal to the Prosodic Hierarchy will be offered and I will suggest a procedural account of phonological domain delimitation. Phenomena to be discussed will include, time permitting, stress and syllable structure, reduplication, bracketing paradoxes, phrasal boundary marking, function words vs. lexical words and cohering vs. non-cohering affixes.