Author Archives: Bruce Hayes

A simple search utility

I made a small utility program meant to search for English words that have particular phonological properties. For example, you could use it to find words that have a long vowel followed by a coda obstruent. It’s not really all that powerful, but it’s flexible (you can make up your own natural classes) and I think it’s also very easy to use.

The phonological dictionary employed consists of all the words in the CMU database that have a CELEX frequency of at least one.

I used the program in a graduate course I just taught on English Phonology to retest the phonological generalizations proposed in the research literature on English.

Download here.  Windows only (sorry).

Bruce Hayes, UCLA

P.S. to commenters: surely there are other such programs available and I would be curious to know about them.

Tenure track phonology position at UCLA

Date Posted: November 24, 2008

Job Description: Subject to final administrative and budgetary approval, the UCLA Department of Linguistics will be conducting a faculty search to fill a tenure-track position, rank Assistant Professor, in the field of phonology. The starting date is July 1, 2009.

Applicants are requested to send the following materials in hard copy: CV, cover letter or other documents describing research and teaching, and sample research papers to the address provided below. Please also indicate where members of the Search Committee can download any research papers that are available electronically but not included in hard copy. Applicants should request three letters of recommendation to be sent from individuals familiar with their work. Lastly, please indicate whether or not you will be attending the January meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where interviews will be conducted. Questions about the position may be directed to the search committee chair, Bruce Hayes (bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu).

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Application Deadline:
December 15, 2008

Application Address:
Phonology Search Committee
Dept. of Linguistics
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
USA

Do phonologists mispell "Tatamagouche"?

Hello, this is basically avoidance behavior, but I thought some of you might like to know…

“Tatamagouche” is a small town in Nova Scotia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatamagouche,_Nova_Scotia). The similar “Tatamagouchi” appears in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968, 114) as an example word, as part of the data justifying a phonological rule that assigns secondary stress in long words.

A Google search on “Tatamagouchi” yields mostly works in phonological theory addressing English stress assignment. I conjecture, therefore, that Chomsky and Halle made a spelling mistake in SPE (or used an archaic spelling) which has since been carried forward by other phonologists, myself included. Cheers, Bruce Hayes

Final Devoicing in Russian-Americans

Hello, I’ve just seen it yet again (“it” = the phenomenon I’m about to describe) and I am intrigued enough to use the Phonoloblog to solicit other phonologists’ views.

Russian is claimed in the research literature to have Final Devoicing; i.e. all obstruents are realized as voiceless in word-final position, irrespective of whether they are underlyingly voiced or voiceless. Yet, when I elicit these forms from Russian speakers I’ve met (usually, students in my classes), I get either partially devoiced or even fully voiced forms – certainly not neutralization of /b/ with /p/, /d/ with /t/, etc.

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Should allophones be taught in intro linguistics?

Hello, I just finished teaching UCLA’s “Introduction to Linguistics” course.  This is ten weeks of syntax, morphology, semantics, phonetics, phonology, and historical, and since there are so many topics it all goes by pretty fast.

In the phonology section, I have been dutifully teaching the classical phoneme and how to discover it (that is to say, the collection of minimal pairs and collation of complementary environments for similar sounds).  I would imagine that this is the practice in many other intro courses.

What occurred to me while I was teaching this was that phonemic analysis might better be postponed to a later course such as (at UCLA) “Introduction to Phonology”.  The alternative that I have in mind would be to let the phonology section of Intro Linguistics focus exclusively on phonological alternations and neutralizing rules. 

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One-year phonology position at UCLA

We’ve got a one-year phonology job in my department for next academic year and would like to encourage interested people to apply. The official announcement is as follows:

The UCLA Department of Linguistics is conducting a search to fill a one-year visiting faculty position in the field of phonology. The visitor will teach a normal load of four one-quarter courses (covering both undergraduate and graduate levels) and participate in the meetings and activities of the department’s phonology research group. Salary will be based on the UCLA faculty scale, with benefits according to the standard UCLA benefits package.

Applicants are requested to send materials in hard copy, including vita, cover letter describing experience and interests for both research and teaching, sample papers, and documentation (in any form desired) of teaching record. Applicants should also request three letters of recommendation to be sent from individuals familiar with their work. Please indicate if you will be attending the January meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where interviews will be conducted. Questions about the position may be directed to the search committee chair at bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu.

The address for application materials is: Bruce Hayes, Chair, Phonology Search Committee, Department of Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543

Deadline: January 2, 2007.

UCLA is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.

Phonetically Based Phonology

We are pleased to announce the publication of Phonetically Based Phonology, a book we have jointly edited. The book presents a general approach to phonology in which many of the constraints are the instantiations in grammar of principles of speech perception, speech production and lexical access.

For ordering information, table of contents, abstract, and links to the chapter authors’ Web sites, see

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/PBP/

The introductory chapter, by Hayes and Steriade, may be downloaded from this site; in addition, several of the individual chapters can be previewed in draft form from the author’s web sites, which are linked from the web page just given.

–Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner, Donca Steriade