Our next (and final of the semester) meeting will be on Dec 2 at 10 AM in room 002. Ray Cox-Casals will be presenting the following paper (attached).
Labrune, L. (2012). Questioning the universality of the syllable: evidence from Japanese. Phonology, 29(1), 113-152.
Ray will be present some critical review of this paper. See the following description:
Labrune (2012) rejects the universality of hierarchical prosodic constituents by looking at the strong usage of moras and feet in Japanese. She argues that the syllable has little to no use by examining the lack of psycholinguistic evidence, speech errors, the lack of phonetic clues for rhyme constituents, pitch accent, and other syllable symptoms. I find several issues with her analysis as she attempts to make every aspect of Japanese suprasegmental phonology fit into a syllable-exclusive mora model by subcategorizing and overextending the labels developed by Hayes (1989) and others. Labrune affirms that moras are CV sequences of segments rather than abstract phonological units and sorts them onto a scale from “fullest” to “weakest,” depending on their behaviour. I believe that this paper overreports evidence and forces an earlier version of Moraic Theory which has progressed, leaving behind an antisyllable analysis of CV moras. Lastly, I argue that most of the confusing information presented and analyzed with an altered version of Moraic Theory can be explained and more elegantly captured by simply adding syllables back into the picture.
There will also be a Zoom link open for this meeting at the following link: