Plenary Speaker
John Archibald
University of Victoria
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Explaining L3 Phonology
In this talk, I will demonstrate that L3 phonological knowledge consists of abstract hierarchical representations for such components as features, syllables, prosodic phrases, and stress assignment (Archibald, in press a). What role does the mental representation of sound play in the generation of third language (L3) linguistic strings (Archibald, 2024)? L3 knowers have complex, phonological grammars which display the familiar problem of the poverty of the stimulus: representational constructs like onset or appendix or foot do not come labelled in the input. These learnability problems reveal that the acquisition of L3 phonology is much more complex than mere ‘noticing’ of elements in the environment. Furthermore, a phonological grammar is not merely an imprint of the environmental stimuli (Archibald, in press b). I will also present principles of Lx restructuring (e.g., triggering, redeployment, and re-ranking) which motivate a transitional theory of developmental grammars (Archibald, 2023). This approach has the potential to establish a unified theory of Lx grammar which is applicable to L1A, L2A, L3A, as well has language change (e.g., Oxford, 2015), and sociolinguistic variation (Natvig & Salmons, 2021).
Archibald (in press a). Second language phonology. In P. de Lacy & A. Jardine , eds. Cambridge Handbook of Phonology.
Archibald, (in press b). The place of phonology in the study of multilingual grammars. Keynote article. Second Language Research.
Archibald, J. (2024). Phonology in Multilingual Grammars: Representational Complexity and Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford University Press.
Archibald, J. (2023). Using a Contrastive Hierarchy to formalize structural similarity as I-proximity in L3 phonology. In N. Kolb, N. Mitrofanova, & M. Westergaard, eds. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 13(5): 614-637.
Berwick, R., P. Pietroski, B. Yankama & N. Chomsky (2011). Poverty of the stimulus revisited. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal 35: 1207-1242.
Oxford, W. (2015). Patterns of contrast in phonological change: Evidence form Algonquian vowel systems. Language 91: 308-357.
Natvig, D. & J. Salmons (2021). Connecting structure and variation in sound change. Cadernos de Lingüistica 2(1): 1-20.
John Archibald, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has been a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria and the University of Calgary. His area of research specialization is second and third language speech, where he has focused on the role of phonological theory in explaining the properties of multilingual sound systems. He has probed the acquisition of new features, segments, syllable structure, and stress. Broadly viewed, his research addresses both Plato's Problem (how we come to know what we know based on impoverished input) and Orwell's Problem (how we remain resistant to certain knowledge in the presence of abundant input); both of these constructs are central to understanding multilingual speech. He is a former Dean of Humanities, and former President of the Canadian Linguistic Association. He is co-editor, with William O'Grady, of Contemporary Linguistic Analysis. His new book Phonology in Multilingual Grammars: Representational Complexity and Linguistic Interfaces is about to be released by Oxford University Press.
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