Alex Chabot talking virtually in Manchester
May 25, 2022
On the abstractness of phonology.
May 25-27, lecturer Alex Chabot is remotely at the 29th Manchester Phonology Meeting, claiming on this basis of his fieldwork in Sardinia that "Fortition in Campidanese Sardinian can only be understood as Substance-Free Phonology," and cannot be understood in surface phonetic terms. In Alex's analysis of the Sardinian pattern, an abstract suprasegmental property of "strength" is realized intervocalically as gemination for /T/ but as spirantization for voiced /D/. Since the latter is not the expected expression of fortition, the phonology is shown to be highly abstract in relation to the phonetics.