Kate at Rutgers

Phonological processes systematically preserve certain information.

Friday September 18, Kate is up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, giving the Colloquium talk at Rutgers Linguistics. Her talk, abstracted below, is "Indelible Inputs." 

Rutgers University was originally named "Queens College" in honor of Queen Charlotte, who was the wife of King George III, and brought the Christmas tree from Germany to England. New Brunswick was named for George III's father, King George II, the Duke of Brunswick in Lower Saxony. "Brunswick" is the Low German cognate of High German "Braunschweig," which gives us the name of the smoked liverwurst Braunschweiger. The latter, more innovative form results from the High German Consonant Shift, the Middle High German /s/ Shift, and New High German Diphthongization.

Phonological processes are modeled using mappings that may overwrite information in the input (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968, Prince & Smolensky 1993, a.o.). In this talk, I identify two typological gaps that suggest that input information must be preserved, motivating additional constraints on phonological transformations. Using data from consonant epenthesis and various forms of displacement, I show that purely phonotactic input-output relations obey a pattern I call input indelibility, where input quality information persists into the output. Prior work has recognized that transformations can be constrained via simultaneous application (e.g. ISL functions in Chandlee 2014), which prohibits feeding in certain configurations, consistent with the new data. But certain cases call for even stronger constraints on input-output mappings, motivating additional structure in the representation.