Four inclusive practices for the phonology classroom

This article presents four classroom practices, intended to increase inclusion and equity, that phonology teachers may find useful. The first is going beyond the simple land acknowledgement to substantively incorporate recognition of local Indigenous people(s) and language(s) into the first day of class. The second is putting languages in richer cultural, historical, and political context. The third is including author photos in class materials both to combat stereotypes and as a self-accountability tool. And the fourth practice is integrating spoken and sign languages in our teaching rather than treating sign language phonology as a separate topic (or not at all)

Polarized Variation

In cases of exceptionality, there are usually many words that behave regularly, a smaller number that behave irregularly (the exceptions), and perhaps an even smaller number whose behavior varies. This paper presents several examples of exceptionality and variation that are polarized in this way: most items exhibit one behavior or the other consistently, with only a minority of items showing variation. The result is a U-shaped histogram of behavior rates. In some cases, this requires listing of surprisingly long units. There are, however, some cases of bell-shaped histograms, where most items show variation, and only a minority are consistent. Some simple simulations are presented to show how polarized variation can result when variation is between two categorical outcomes, and both types of variation can result when variation is along a phonetic continuum.Quan parlem d'excepcionalitat, generalment hi ha moltes paraules amb un comportament regular, un grup menor amb comportament irregular (les excepcions), i potser un grup encara menor que varien. Aquest article presenta diversos exemples d'excepcionalitat i de variació que son polaritzats així: la majoria dels ítems exhibeixen un comportament o l'altre quasi constantment, amb només una minoria d'ítems que varien. Resulta un histograma en forma d'U, si tracem proporcions de comportament. Hi ha alguns casos que exigeixen allistar elements de llargada sorprenent. Tanmateix, existeixen casos d'histogrames en forma de campana: la majoria dels ítems exhibeixen variació, amb només una minoria que siguin constants. Es presenten simulacions senzilles que mostren de quina manera la variació pot resultar polaritzada quan és entre categories, i de quina manera les dues menes de variació son possibles quan la variació es troba en un contínuum

Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies

The word-level prosody of Samoan

This paper documents and analyses stress and vowel length in Samoan words. The domain of footing, the Prosodic Word, appears to be a root and cohering suffixes; prefixes and most disyllabic suffixes form a separate domain. Vowel sequences that disrupt the normal stress pattern require constraints matching sonority prominence to metrical prominence, sensitive to degree of mismatch and to the number of vowels involved. Two suffixes unexpectedly have an idiosyncratic footing constraint, observable only in a limited set of words. We also discuss trochaic shortening and its asymmetrical productivity, and the marginal contrastiveness of some features in loans. While Samoan does not appear to be typologically unusual, it does offer arguments (i) in favour of alignment constraints on Prosodic Words rather than only on feet directly, and (ii) against simple cyclicity. Some of the strongest evidence comes from stress patterns of the rich inventory of phonotactically licit vowel sequences

A model of lexical variation and the grammar with application to Tagalog nasal substitution

This paper presents a case of patterned exceptionality. The case is Tagalog nasal substitution, a phenomenon in which a prefix-final nasal fuses with a stem-initial obstruent. The rule is variable on a word-by-word basis, but its distribution is phonologically patterned, as shown through dictionary and corpus data. Speakers appear to have implicit knowledge of the patterning, as shown through experimental data and loan adaptation. A grammar is proposed that reconciles the primacy of lexical information with regularities in the distribution of the rule. Morphologically complex words are allowed to have their own lexical entries, whose use is preferred to on-the-fly morphological concatenation. The grammar contains lower-ranked markedness constraints that govern the behavior of novel words. Faithfulness for lexicalized full words is ranked high, so that an established word will have a stable pronunciation. But when a word is newly coined through affixation, the outcome varies according the lexical trends. A crucial aspect of the proposal is that the ranking of the “subterranean” markedness constraints can be learned despite training data in which all words are pronounced faithfully, using Boersma’s (1997, 1998) Gradual learning algorithm. The paper also shows, by summarizing the rule’s behavior in related languages, that the same constraints, in different rankings, seem to be at work even in languages reported to lack variation