Abstract for Andrew Nevins's talk

The Morphophonology of Lingua do Pe in Salvador, Brasil
Andrew Nevins (Harvard)
September 8, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

- Lingua do Pe is a traditional iterative infixing fixed-consonantism reduplication language game, similar to those played in Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, and American English, usually under names such as "Ubbi-Dubbi".

- The Portuguese dialect spoken in Salvador, Brasil exhibits two tell-tale phonological processes: Pre-Coronal Laminalization and Pre-tonic Vowel Nasalization.

Maximiliano Guimaraes and I have made up 3 language games (two of which are reduplicative fixed consonantisms and one of which is a static infix) and examined subjects' mastery and performance of them in an experimental setting. I will present the results of our research, in an attempt to motivate the claim that language games can provide definitive insight into four lines of inquiry:
- What is the right characterization of dialect variation?
- Does orthographic knowledge enter into purely auditory phonological performance?
- How do allophonic rules interact with reduplication?
- What is the right representation of the "how complex" of a language game is, and of where mistakes are likely to be made?