Kate at McGill

What is phonology?

February 20, Kate Mooney is up at McGill to give a talk in their colloquium series, on "Explaining asymmetries between (morpho-)phonological and phonetic operations." Kate's abstract is below.

Phonological patterns often bear morphological restrictions. In both SPE-style rules and Optimality Theory, these partially productive alternations are often treated as manifestations of a single, computationally uniform phonological system. For example, rules may be restricted by their ordering or lexical diacritics, but the core claim is that these rules are not substantively different from those in general phonology. In this talk, I challenge this view. Based on a typological study, I demonstrate that morphologically-restricted and general phonological patterns do not in fact form the same class of alternations. Some patterns are only attested with morphological restrictions, but they never generalize fully. I therefore argue that phonology is not computationally uniform, and present one non-uniform model that offers an explanatory account of the typology. The picture that emerges is one where general phonology must preserve information — both order and certain types of (gestural) content — whereas only morphologically-restricted patterns can freely rewrite segments