Linguistics Seminar Series: Kyle Gorman (CUNY)
- Event Type
- Lecture
- Sponsor
- Department of Linguistics and the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics
- Location
- Gregory Hall 319
- Date
- Oct 27, 2025 4:00 pm
- Views
- 17
- Originating Calendar
- Linguistics Event Calendar
Join us for this exciting entry in the Linguistics Seminar Series!
- Talk Title: "Unexceptional targets and triggers in phonology"
- Abstract: Nearly all work in phonology follows from the central but usually-implicit premise that "narrow" phonological solutions are to be preferred, ceteris paribus, to analyses which make reference to morphemic identity or morphosyntactic context ("exceptionality"), or which employ suppletion. Crucially, the literature fails to provide a mechanistic explanation for how children converge on these narrow analyses over exceptional or suppletive alternatives.
Logical Phonology (LP), a novel and formally austere approach to phonological computation, addresses this by hypothesizing that children are epistemically bounded to select empirically adequate narrow phonological analyses. This hypothesis, coupled with LP's novel approach to rules and representations, predicts that many phenomena previously labeled as exceptional are, in fact, encoded exceptionlessly within the narrow phonology through the systematic use of "archiphonemic" underspecification. This talk details five key taxonomic patterns arising from LP: 1) the mutability of underspecified targets versus the inalterability of prespecified targets (cf. Inkelas et al.), 2) the catalysis of prespecified triggers versus the quiescence of underspecified triggers, 3) interactions between mutability and catalysis (cf. Kisseberth's theory of exceptionality), 4) underspecification as a mechanism for non-derived environment blocking, and 5) a counterintuitive constraint on segment deletion called delete the rich. Case studies illustrating these principles are drawn from Barrow Inupiaq, Baztan Basque, Blackfoot, Czech, English, Finnish, Hungarian, Spanish, and Turkish