Chabot in Phonology

The abstractness of lenition and gemination in Sardinian.

Fresh off the presses of Phonology, "Prosodic strength in Campidanese Sardinian as Substance-Free Phonology" from recent postdoc Alex Chabot, in which he endeavors to "provide a phonological account of an intricate pattern of lenition and gemination in Campidanese Sardinian" and to argue the pattern requires an account that is highly abstract in relation to the phonetics. During his time here, Alex presented this work at the North American Phonology Conference and the Manchester Phonology Meeting. The journal article is abstracted below. 

The ambition of this article is to provide a phonological account of an intricate pattern of lenition and gemination in Campidanese Sardinian. The data show two things: that a model of phonology needs some way of showing strength and weakness as positional effects and that neither can be reliably understood in phonetic terms. In this analysis, the discovery procedure does not depend on raw phonetic facts, but rather on a rich model of abstract phonological representations. These representations are of two kinds, melodic and prosodic, and they allow for a substance-free phonological analysis of lenition and fortition in Campidanese that is not confronted by the difficulties inherent in surface-oriented approaches.