Two talks by Kate at alma mater

Pulling apart phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax.

November 13 and 14, Kate is back at the University of Chicago, her undergraduate home, to give two talks, one for the Linguistics Colloquium, "Explaining asymmetries between (morpho-)phonological and phonetic operations," and the other for the department's Morphology and Syntax Workshop, "Deriving person discontinuities with PF Movement." Read the abstracts below!

Explaining asymmetries between (morpho-)phonological and phonetic operations

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 order 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 argue that phonology is not computationally uniform, and present one non-uniform model that offers an explanatory account of the typology.

Deriving person discontinuities with PF Movement

In this talk, I examine person and case discontinuities in the pronominal clitics of Yulparija, a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in Western Australia. Curiously, Yulparija has parallel sets of discontinuities at the clausal level (interleaving Obj-Subj-Obj) and within individual clitics (interleaving Person-Case-Person-Case). These parallelisms suggest that whatever the source of the discontinuities, it applies equally across multiple levels of structure. To capture these data, I argue that discontinuities emerge from genuine movements computed at PF. I propose a Spellout mechanism that interleaves vocabulary insertion with movement, and demonstrate that these discontinuities are predictable based on the morphological decomposition of the individual clitic morphemes. This account thus provides a way to connect the morphological composition of pronominal clitics to their clausal behavior, suggesting that clitic order may not be as arbitrary as previously thought.