Program

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Abstracts of Plenary Speakers

Maho Morimoto (NINJAL)

"Production of geminated liquids in Japanese and some implications for the phonetics of geminates"

While the Japanese language makes abundant use of consonant length contrast, geminated liquids are disfavored and are only allowed in loanwords and emphatic expressions. Reflecting their marginal status in the phonological system, phonetic documentation of geminated liquids in Japanese remains limited (e.g., Kawahara & Matsui 2017). In this talk, I report on a production study of geminated liquids in Japanese using EMA (electromagnetic articulography). Acoustic and articulatory results suggest that speakers are able to reliably produce the length contrast, while employing various strategies to go around the phonetic challenges associated with the gemination of liquids, such as perceptual difficulty and antagonistic gestural specification. I further propose that some of the characteristics of geminated liquids highlight previously suggested acoustic correlates for obstruent geminates in the language.

Zheng Shen (National University of Singapore)

"Closest agreement in Slavic languages: linear order or hierarchy"

Closest agreement (CA) refers to cases where the agreement marking on the target is (seemingly) decided by the linearly closest controller. In (1), for example, the marking on the copular verb is is decided by the first conjunct NP a book, rather than the whole conjunction a book and two notebooks.

(1) There is a book and two notebooks on the table.

CA is observed across languages and is especially widespread among Slavic languages. An active debate over this phenomenon is what role the linear order plays in selecting the agreement controller. The linear order approach proposes that the agreement operation is sensitive to the linear order. On the other hand, the hierarchical approach argues that the seemingly linear effects can be accounted for using a system that does not refer to linear order at all.

In this talk, I evaluate these approaches with data from Right Node Raising and Coordinate Structure Constraint-violating movement.