The Department of French & Italian presents a lecture by
Marie-Hélène Côté
On the Variable Nature of Syllabification
Thursday, February
21, 2008
5:30 pm
Maple Room, Indiana
Memorial Union
Refreshments before
talk, at 5:00 pm
Abstract: In this talk I explore some issues related to the nature of syllabification and its role in phonology. Syllabification is usually taken to be a categorical process in phonology. Categorical syllabification is, however, at odds with a variety of experimental results as well as native speakers’ direct intuitions, which suggest a more fluid syllabification, with consonants being variably associated with the preceding segment (coda), the following one (onset) or both (ambisyllabicity). This gap between theory and (experimental) data needs to be addressed. First, I discuss different ways in which this gap can be interpreted and possible effects of the experimental task on syllabification judgments (reporting on a series of experiments on Russian). Second, I explore the sources of syllabification data, considering syllabification to be an inherently variable and gradient process subject to a variety of possibly conflicting factors. I suggest that syllabification depends in large part on a principle of perceptual dependency, according to which the syllabic affiliation of a consonant is a function of the degree of perceptual dependency between it and each of its adjacent segments. This perceptual principle interacts with other known factors related to word margins, morpheme structure and rhythm. Third, I explore some of the consequences of such an approach to syllabification for phonological theory and the variety of processes that have been claimed to depend on strict syllable constituents or boundaries. The discussion throughout the talk will be illustrated with examples from French.
About the speaker: Marie-Hélène Côté is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her ongoing research projects include “Status of the syllable in phonology and factors affecting syllabification” and “Status and distribution of the French schwa: the role of perception and variation,” both funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Sponsored by the Mary-Margaret Barr Koon Fund of the Department of French & Italian, with support from the Department of Linguistics.
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