The 22nd Colloquium on Generative Grammar was held in Barcelona on March 21-23. Donca Steriade was an invited speaker (The cycle without containment), and talks were given by graduate student Yusuke Imanishi (A Non-Uniform Merge of Argument WH: A Case Study in Kaqchikel) and recent alum Maria Giavazzi (PhD 2010; “Assibilation in Standard Finnish: a case of stress-conditioned contrast neutralization”). The conference also included a poster by Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009; “No need for a theory of the distribution of readings of English bare plurals”).
Next month, a sizable group of current and recent members of our department will be at the 20th anniversary of the Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm20, May 24-26). As part of the anniversary, invited speakers will discuss unsolved problems in phonology. Among the speakers are faculty member Donca Steriade, on segment sequencing, and recent visitor Nina Topintzi (Universitaet Leipzig), on compensatory lengthening. Additionally, the following abstracts were accepted:
Talks:
Adam Albright: “Shared neutralizations without shared representations”
Sam Alxatib: “The stress-epenthesis opacity in Palestinian Arabic”
Tara McAllister Byun (PhD 2009, Montclair State University), Sharon Inkelas, and Yvan Rose: “Transient phonology, CON and child phonological processes”
Laura McPherson (Visiting student 2011, UCLA) and Bruce Hayes: “Relating application frequency to morphological structure: the case of Tommo So vowel harmony”
Kevin Tang and Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005, UCL): “Learning from mistakes: computational modelling of slips of the ear”
Posters:
Gretchen Kern: “Perceptual similarity in sonority contours: evidence from Early Irish rhyming patterns”
Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009, University of Paris 7): “The stochastic error-driven ranking model of child variation”
Sam Steddy: “How palatalisation in Italian verbs is a regular process”
Suyeon Yun: “A typology of epenthesis positioning in loanword adaptation: A perceptual account”
Congratulations to all!