Dear colleagues,
we are very happy to announce the next talk in our phonology colloquium this term. Eva Zimmermann (U Leipzig) will talk about “Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions”.
The talk will take place online.
Title: Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions
Time: 02. December 2020, 4 pm ct
Place: Zoom
Abstract below:
Gradient Symbolic Representations and the Typology of Phonological Exceptions
The assumption of Gradient Symbolic Representations that phonological elements can have different degrees of activity (Smolensky and Goldrick, 2016; Rosen, 2016; Zimmermann, 2018, 2019) allows a unified explanation for the typology of phonological exceptions.
Exceptional (non)triggers and (non)undergoers of otherwise regular phonological processes are predicted from gradient constraint violations: The activation of a phonological element in an underlying morpheme representation determines 1) how much the element is preserved by faithfulness constraints and 2) how much it is visible for markedness constraints. I argue that this simple mechanism predicts the attested typology of phonological exceptions and that the predictions made by the GSR account are empirically more adequate than the ones made by alternative approaches to exceptionality based on autosegmental defectivity (Lieber, 1987; Tranel, 1996; Zoll, 1996) or lexically indexed constraints (Pater, 2006; Flack, 2007; Mahanta, 2012).