LING2220/5220 - Spring 2023
Course details will be adapted to the background, interests and goals of the participants. (If you're curious about what the range of topics might be like, you can check out the pages for some earlier editions of the course: 2022, 2021, 2019, 2017, 2016 ...)
Part 1: Background and (a few) Sample Projects
Mark Liberman, "Corpus Phonetics", Annual Review of Linguistics 2019.
What; why; progress and prospects...
Mark Liberman, "Towards Progress in Theories of Language Sound Structure", in Shaping Phonology , 2018
The boundary between symbols and signals -- theory, practice, and the role in communication, socio-cultural variation, and historical sound change.
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet"
Consonant effects on F0. Some Breakfast Experiments™, relevant because of the role of these effects in (some kinds of) tonogenesis:
"Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels"
"Consonant effects on F0 are multiplicative"
"Consonant effects on F0 in Chinese"
A small example of the phonetics of syntax: Lecture notes on "The distribution of wanna contraction" from the Spring 2021 edition of LING620, which explored one aspect of an ad hoc corpus of 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours.
Tunes: Stylistic, Political, Geographical
"Overall F0 trends at syllable and phrase scale" (lecture notes from the 2016 edition of this course)
Some visualization of prosodic styles.
"Analyzing the phonetics of tone alignment in Dinka"
Part 2: Towards doing it yourself
We'll start with a class project on "T/D Deletion"...
or should it be "T/D Lenition"?
For a start, read Laurel MacKenzie and Meredith Tamminga, "New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion", 2021.
And a small sample of papers on incomplete neutralization and "near mergers" (see especially Labov et al. 1991):
Labov, Yeager, and Steiner, "A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress", NSF Report 1972.
Port et al., "Neutralization of obstruent voicing in German is incomplete", JASA 1981.
Port and O'Dell, "Neutralization of syllable-final voicing in German", JPhon 1985.
Labov, Karen, and Miller, " Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast", LVC 1991
Liu, "Incomplete Tone Merger as Evidence for Lexical Diffusion in Dalian", NAACL 2010.
Cheng et al., "Are Mandarin Sandhi Tone 3 and Tone 2 the Same or Different? The Results of Functional Data Analysis", PACLIC 2013.
Yuan and Chen, "3rd tone sandhi in standard Chinese: A corpus approach", J. of Chinese Linguistics 2014.
Politzer-Ahles et al., "Mandarin third tone sandhi may be incompletely neutralizing in perception as well as production", ICPhS 2019.