Workshop 2019

<Date and Place>

Date: 14 December 2019 (14:00－17:10)

Place: Room H302. Hay Memorial Hall, Tsuchitoi Campus, Tohoku Gakuin University

https://www.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp/en/access/

https://www.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp/campusmap/tsuchitoi.html

<Outline>

In the field of linguistics, scholars have appealed to various properties of language which they argue can shed light not only on the nature of language itself but also on how human language differs from other human endowments and from the specialised cognitive abilities of non-human animals. In phonology, for example, which is the branch of linguistics concerned with language sound systems, it is proposed that one such property is the use of certain types of relations between units. The units of phonological description can be related to one another in two ways: asymmetrically (resulting in strong-weak, head-dependent, or licensor-licensee pairs) and in terms of precedence (resulting in a linear ordering of units). The role of relational properties is crucial because such relations have a significant influence on the kinds of rules or constraints that can be imposed on language (Harris 1994, Nasukawa 2011). Ultimately, then, the form of language depends on which and how many properties we choose to recognize, since these properties determine which rules or constraints can be used to control the shape of human languages. The rules/constraints in question constitute one aspect of the language knowledge expressed by the phonological component of the grammar. So, in order to characterize the overall shape of the phonological component and its evolutionary path, and to determine the place of phonology within the language faculty as a whole, it is essential that scholars determine exactly what kinds of relational properties are involved (Nasukawa 2017).