Michael Obiri-Yeboah and Sharon Rose have new paper in NLLT

Graduate student Michael Obiri-Yeboah and faculty member Sharon Rose have a new paper out in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory:

Obiri-Yeboah, Michael & Sharon Rose. 2021. Vowel harmony and phonological phrasing in Gua

Abstract
In Gua, an underdocumented Tano Guang language spoken in Ghana, regressive ATR vowel harmony applies within words and non-iteratively across word boundaries. Although vowel harmony is known to cross word boundaries in some languages, little is known about the domains and extent of such harmony. We show that ATR harmony in Gua operates within phonological phrases that preferentially consist of two or three words, with binary phrases at the left edge and ternary phrases at the right edge of the utterance. Syntactic structure can exert an influence, but only with respect to subjects. In addition, we demonstrate that unary phrases are permitted, but not at the edge of the utterance. Gua is the first reported vowel harmony case that shows the same kind of phonological phrasing sensitivity as other prosodic phenomena, such as tone and duration.

SDLP Issue 9 has been published

Issue 9 of San Diego Linguistics Papers, our open-access online working papers series, has just been published and available here. It was edited by Yuan Chai, Neşe Demir, Duk-Ho Jung, and Nina Hagen Kaldhol, and includes two papers:

  • Yuan Chai, “Predicting discrimination accuracy by assimilation pattern, overlap score, and acoustic properties”
  • Eric Meinhardt, Anna Mai, Eric Baković, Adam G. McCollum, “On the proper treatment of weak determinism: Subsequentiality and simultaneous application in phonological maps”

Gabriela Caballero and Michelle Yuan at WCCFL 39

Faculty members Gabriela Caballero and Michelle Yuan and co-author Claudia Juárez Chávez presented a virtual talk at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 39), hosted by the University of Arizona. Their talk, part of the Formal Linguistics for Language Reclamation special session, was entitled, “The representation of tone in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological and orthographic implications.”

Graduate students and faculty at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics

Several departmental members are presenting talks at the online Annual Conference on African Linguistics 51-52 on April 8-10 at the University of Florida. Graduate students Neşe Demir, Yaqian Huang and José Armando Fernández Guerrero are presenting research on Rere (Koalib) stemming from the 2019 field methods classes with Taitas Kanda. Graduate student Anthony Struthers-Young is presenting on Northern Toussian based on his fieldwork in Burkina Faso, and graduate student Nina Hagen Kaldhol and faculty member Sharon Rose are presenting new work on Tira with Himidan Hassen.