Speaker: Jeff Mielke
Title: Emergent Phonology on Small and Large Scales
Time: Friday 11/18, 3:30PM
Place: Education 624
In this talk I illustrate the emergence of phonological patterns on a micro scale, through individual variation in the distribution of categorically different tongue postures for /r/ in North American English and rhotic vowels in Canadian French. Second, I will show how the typology of speaker-level /r/ allophony patterns is phonetically constrained and how it parallels the typology of language-level /l/ allophony patterns. I will conclude by showing how some other typological observations (e.g. distinctive feature effects and crosslinguistic phoneme frequencies) can be accounted for through the role of phonetics in the emergence of sound patterns.