Abstract for Charles Reiss's talk

Phonology is still interesting
Charles Reiss (Concordia University Montreal)
October 18, 2007 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

A survey of current journals and conference programs will reveal that much of what is called "phonology" nowadays includes what used to fall into the domains of "phonetics" and "computational linguistics". In this talk, I will argue that there is still a place for Good Old Fashioned Generative Phonology (GOFGP). My argument will be three-pronged, and all three parts will discuss vowel harmony, a form of assimilation among the vowels in a word's morphemes that sometimes reflects long-distance dependencies:

1. I will argue that at least some of the work that claims to demonstrate the crucial role of phonetics in phonology is misleading, and is more suggestive of the irrelevance of phonetics to phonology, supporting the "substance-free" approach of Hale and Reiss (2000) and precursors like Kaplan (1987). In particular, I will discuss the claims of Benus and Gafos (2007) who report on articulatory studies of disharmonic roots in Hungarian, and proposes an analysis in the framework of exemplar theory.

2. I will provide an example of a functioning, but pointless, implementation of vowel harmony generation (using Cellular Automata) to demonstrate that computational modeling, as part of the biolinguistic program, must be informed by the cognitive science distinction between strong and weak computational equivalence
(Pylyshyn 1984). Despite its pointlessness, I hope that the demonstration will help to illustrate a general issue about the relationship between representation and computation.

3. I will present some of my research on vowel harmony, which I consider to fall into the category of GOFGP, and try to argue that such work is not only interesting, but also logically prior to the undertaking of phonetic studies and implementations. The notion of locality and issues related to feature logic are central to this work.

The talk, which will be accessible to all, thus constitutes a plea to students to not abandon GOFGP, to discover that such phonology is still interesting.