We are going to have another colloquium talk this semester, on February 23 (680 Sherbrooke West, room 1041). It will be given by our very own Andrei Munteanu. The title and abstract are below:
Title: An examination of the non-phonological nature of the Prosodic Hierarchy
Abstract: 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.