James Myers (National Chung Cheng University) and Peggy Mok (Chinese University of Hong Kong) will present back-to-back colloquia. It will be a hybrid presentation, in-person that the TFS Reading Room and online here. Titles and abstracts are below.
Tuesday, June 23 at 12:30-1:30
Analogues of morphology and phonology in writing systems
James Myers, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
Those stubborn linguists who insist on studying writing systems have long distinguished between a level where written units are mapped to spoken language and one where the written units themselves are realized physically. In his pioneering book, Ignace Gelb called these two levels inner structure and outer form (corresponding to the more recent terms graphematics vs. graphetics). The not particularly humble goal of this talk is to show that these levels are essentially the written analogues of morphology and phonology, which likewise contrast in their mapping versus realization functions. This functional contrast turns out to be associated with a whole host of formal differences, as suggested by theoretical, quantitative, and experimental analyses of Chinese logography, English alphabetic spelling, Brahmic abugidas, and true syllabaries. While inner structure shows analogues to morphological compounding, affixation, and reduplication, outer form involves phoneme-like strokes distinguished by a small set of features, with both systems subject to formal asymmetries reminiscent of prosodic structure. Moreover, quantitative analyses demonstrate that writing systems of all sorts show the same contrast in the effects of lexical frequency on inner structure (where rarer items tend to regularize, as in morphology) and outer form (where it is instead the common items that tend to regularize, as in phonetically motivated phonology). Experiments on the recognition and handwriting of Chinese characters also show these contrasts in frequency effects, as well as evidence for the productive knowledge of prosody-like structure. These suspiciously grammar-like properties, whatever their ultimate explanation, seem to tell us something important about the nature and scope of the human linguistic capacity.
Tuesday, June 23 at 1:45-2:45
Productivity and diversity of tone sandhi patterns in Chinese dialects
Peggy Mok, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Tone sandhi as a higher level obligatory phonological process is a common feature of many Chinese dialects with diverse patterns. Previous studies argued that transparent tone sandhi patterns are productive based on a computational mechanism while opaque patterns are not productive with allomorph listing only. The current study investigates the acquisition of diverse tone sandhi patterns in Xiamen Southern Min, Wenzhou Wu and Baotou Jin to examine the productivity issue with a wider perspective. The results suggest that productivity is a continuum with dialect-specific coping strategies for non-application of tone sandhi.