On May 10, Jenny Bellik gave a talk on Binarity constraints in the Keio x ICU colloquium series, titled “Size effects in prosody: Counting branches, counting leaves.”

Abstract: Binarity—the pressure for phonological constituents to contain exactly two elements—is widely recognized as a factor that shapes prosody. This talk investigates two contrasting conceptions of phrasal binarity, and their divergent consequences. Branch-counting binarity is a structural constraint that counts a phonological phrase’s branches. Branch-counting binarity prioritizes matching larger, branching XPs, and works in tandem with Match(XP) to produce recursive prosodic structure. In contrast, leaf-counting binarity is a length constraint that counts the words that a phonological phrase contains. Word-counting binarity prefers not to match larger XPs, and conflicts with Match(XP). It predicts a more complex typology than branch-counting binarity. Both branch-counting and leaf-counting binarity constraints are needed to account for the range of observed size effects cross-linguistically, as seen in examples from phrasing in Irish (Elfner 2012) and Italian (Van Handel to appear).

The talk was recorded and can be viewed on Youtube or below.

Last week, the SPOT group presented an organized session on Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory at the 2021 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Junko Ito opened the session with an introduction to the SPOT project. Jennifer Bellik presented a tutorial on how to set up an analysis in SPOT, and Nick Kalivoda, Richard Bibbs, and Nick Van Handel presented theoretical results found using SPOT + OTWorkplace. Armin Mester concluded the session with some remarks on the value of including all candidates in an OT analysis.

Below are links to pdfs of the handouts and slides presented in that session. Thanks to the audience for attending and asking interesting questions!

Bellik_LSA2021_SPOT_tutorial_handout

Kalivoda_LSA2021_Japanese_Matching_Alignment_slides

Bibbs_LSA2021_aligndrivenChamorro_slides

VanHandel_LSA2021_SubcatMatch_slides

The SPOT team will present an organized session at the 2021 virtual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America TODAY at 5:15pm (PST).

If you’re registered for the LSA, join us on Zoom for a tutorial on how to set up an analysis in SPOT and calculate a factorial typology in OTWorkplace, and for talks about theoretical results found using SPOT on the need for both Match and Align constraints together to account for phonological phrasing in Japanese; the capacity of Align constraints to motivate leftward weak pronoun movement in Chamorro; and principled restrictions on subcategory sensitive Match constraints.

Schedule:

1. Introduction – Junko Ito
2. SPOT App Tutorial – Jennifer Bellik
3. Case study 1: Phonological phrasing in Japanese – Nick Kalivoda
4. Case study 2: Align-driven clitic movement in Chamorro – Richard Bibbs
5. Case study 3: Investigating subcategory-sensitive Match constraints in SPOT – Nicholas Van Handel
6. Question period and concluding remarks – Armin Mester

Read all the abstracts here: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/system/files/abstracts/summary/SPOT%20Tutorial_0.pdf

Several SPOT members recently participated in the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2020, virtually hosted by UC Santa Cruz, which offered many opportunities for interesting conversations about prosody. Presentations by SPOT members were:

• A talk by Nick Kalivoda and Jenny Bellik on “Matching overtly-headed XPs in Irish phrasing Irish.”
  • We resolve a ranking paradox discovered by Elfner 2012 for the phrasing of four-word Irish sentences using classical OT (rather than Harmonic Grammar as in Elfner 2012), by introducing Match(Overtly-headed Phrase) alongside Match(XP), and also motivate a revised version of StrongStart
  • [abstract] [handout]
• A poster by Richard Bibbs: “Align-driven clitic movement in Chamorro” [poster]
• A poster by Netta Ben-Meir: “The prosodic structure of Construct State nominals in Modern Hebrew”

In January 2020, shortly before the (inter)national shutdown due to the novel coronavirus, Junko Ito, Armin Mester, Jennifer Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, graduate students Richard Bibbs and Nick Van Handel, and undergraduate Max Tarlov all traveled to Eckerd College in St. Petersberg, Florida, for the fourth meeting of the Society for Typological Analysis (SOTA IV), organized by Naz Merchant, Birgit Alber, and Alan Prince. The conference combined workshops and tutorials on creating a Property Analysis (PA), with presentations of typological analyses (including many new PAs).

Junko Ito & Armin Mester gave an invited talk, entitled “Issues in Recursive Prosody”.

Jennifer Bellik & Nick Kalivoda also presented a tutorial on SPOT, along with a talk comparing property analyses for branch-counting and leaf-counting binarity. [handout][slides]

Nick Van Handel, Richard Bibbs, and Max Tarlov also gave presentations of work developed at SOTA.

Several members of the SPOT team visited Tokyo to attend the 6th International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology, which was jointly hosted by SPOT and NINJAL (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics). The first session of the conference was dedicated to the SPOT project. Junko Ito and Armin Mester opened the session with their talk “Introduction: Why SPOT?” Jenny Bellik followed this up with a tutorial and demonstration of the SPOT webapp. The remainder of the session consisted of three case-studies demonstrating SPOT’s utility for analyses of prosody and for theory-building in different languages:

• lexical accent and phrasing in Japanese + Basque (Jenny Bellik)
• Match visibility settings in Italian phrasing (Nick Van Handel)
• clitic placement in Chamorro (Richard Bibbs)

Three SPOT posters were also presented that same day:

• “A Binarity binarity: Branch-counting vs. leaf-counting” by Jenny Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, and Nick Van Handel
• “Recursivity and the Definition of MATCH in Italian Syntax-Prosody” by Nick Van Handel
• “Prosodic Alignment of Weak Pronouns in Chamorro” by Richard Bibbs

Thank you to NINJAL for a very interesting and smoothly-run conference!

Slides and some posters can be viewed and downloaded here.