On formal universals in phonology

Understanding the universal aspects of human language structure requires comparison at multiple levels of analysis. While Evans & Levinson (E&L) focus mostly on substantive variation in language, equally revealing insights can come from studying formal universals. I first discuss how Artificial Grammar Experiments can test universal preferences for certain types of abstract phonological generalizations over others. I then discuss moraic onsets in the language Arrernte, and how its apparent substantive variation ultimately rests on a formal universal regarding syllable-weight sensitivity

Representability for some moduli stacks of framed sheaves

We prove a representability theorem for moduli functors of framed torsion-free sheaves on nonsingular complex projective surfaces, using formal geometry along a curve in the surface. This has as a consequence that a certain restriction morphism for moduli stacks of sheaves has fibers that are schemes.Comment: 6 pages, AMSLaTeX, substantially revised and shortened versio

Triumphs and limits of the Contrastivity-Only Hypothesis

The Variable Hierarchy hypothesis of Dresher (2009) has a number of far-reaching consequences and applications – beyond the domain for which it was originally developed – including overspecification, kinship terminology, vowel reduction and whistled languages. On the other hand, the Contrastivity-Only Hypothesis of Dresher (2009) is, in its present form, empirically too limited once one looks at a full system of phonological processes within a language, and some reference to noncontrastive features seems inevitable. However, I outline a possible set of diagnostics and distinctions that might allow one to localize and limit the reference to noncontrastive features

Moraic onsets in Arrernte

The Australian language Arrernte has been argued by Breen & Pensalfini (1999) and Evans & Levinson (2009) to present a case of VC syllabification with coda maximisation, rather than CV syllabification with onset maximisation. In this paper we demonstrate that greater insights into a number of phenomena are achieved when they are analysed with CV syllabification and onset consonants that are moraic, a possibility independently proposed for a wide range of languages by Topintzi (2010). We review a range of evidence from phonetic studies, acquisition and musicology that points towards CV syllabification in Arrernte, and analyse allomorphy, stress assignment, reduplication and the transpositional language game 'Rabbit Talk' in terms of reference to moraic structure. The results lend themselves to new directions in the analysis of Arrernte, and provide further evidence for moraic onsets in prosodic morphology