Abstract for Paul de Lacy's talk

Phonological Evidence
Paul de Lacy (Rutgers University)
October 20, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

A wide variety of data is cited in support of phonological theories. Putative evidence includes synchronic alternations, phonotactics, loanword adaptation, diachronic change, language games, typological frequency, text frequency, order of language acquisition, phonetic naturalness, and properties of pidgins and creoles.
The aim of this talk is to identify principles that distinguish between evidence, potential evidence, and non-evidence. I start from a formalist conception of phonology and build on my research in markedness theory.
Many sound-related phenomena have been cited in support of theories of phonological markedness. However, I argue that very few phenomena provide valid evidence. I show that distinguishing evidence from non-evidence allows several formal properties of markedness to be discovered. In addition, a number of recent theoretical proposals are argued to rely on non-evidence to support phonological proposals (e.g. Dispersion Theory and associated work, Evolutionary Phonology).