Jonah Katz

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Never ask a linguist "Is that a word?" because you will always get the same response, "IT IS NOW!" 😃 delivered with some variation of jazz hands like you just won a very low stakes game show and I'm so sorry it's just part of the training it's not something we can control.

Thanks! I'll have a look.

I feel like there's enough people doing this that there must be a set of shared assumptions, but I don't think I've ever seen them spelled out. 4/4

Like, what does autosegmental GEN or rich base look like? How do correspondence and underspecification work? (In all fairness, it wasn't that clear how underspecification worked in 'normal' autosegmental theory). Can markedness and faithfulness both refer to autosegments and association lines? 3/n

I sometimes run into abstracts or papers that just pop autosegmental representations into tableaux, and I feel like I'm supposed to know how this works. But I really, really, really don't. 2/n

Question for phonologists: do you know of a good piece (paper, chapter, entry, doesn't matter) that explains in detail how doing OT with autosegmental representations is supposed to work? 1/n

At some point when I realized that lots of seriously hardcore developers and CS faculty just stick with plain html, I decided to do the same. It's universally readable on any device any time and will survive a nuclear war. Good enough.

Thanks! I'll take a look.

Have not tried this, but it looks great. I can mostly get the Praat picture window to do what I want these days, but it took a decade plus and it's still kinda fiddly. Anybody have any experience using this package?

Ooh, I gotta take a look at that.

Yeah, regardless of those fiddly details, I think the overall suggestion is on the mark: you could probably extract a large amount of stress info from those two properties. Shortening of immediately post-tonic consonants is also an underrated stress cue for American English.

For vowels, if the transcriber is using schwa instead of, e.g. wedge or lax I, they probably already know the stress and these transcriptions might just reflect that knowledge instead of anything phonetic. For some tokens. But you could probably get a lot out of those transcriptions.

If it's just presence or absence of aspiration, you'd have a hard time distinguishing stress from word-initiality. Word-initial voiceless stops preceding schwa are lightly aspirated, pre-stress ones are heavily aspirated, there's probably overlap in distributions of VOT values.

Except Finnish. You go to your room, Finnish, and think about what you've done.

Anybody have an idea (or a reference) for why initial articulations in a constituent are longer? I've seen one general motor-control principle where you want to minimize the derivative of acceleration. And a bunch of motor-planning explanations of why *final* elements would slow. Anything else?

Gulp

I'm teaching a seminar on the phonetics and phonology of synchronic lenition, fortition, domain-initial strengthening, etc. Anybody have recommendations for good recent papers I should include? Obviously, I have many good options in my own research area, but I'm trying get outside my bubble.

As a longtime employee of a third-tier public flagship in flyover country, which is broadly representative of where the majority of American college students study, it was *maddening* to read the endless think pieces about how Yale, Oberlin, and Harvard reveal what's wrong with American education.

I've sort of started going in this direction as well, trying to limit my example sets to things from really well-documented primary sources or my own data. But it feels like it will take 100 years to replace *all* of my teaching materials this way. I guess I should keep plugging.

YouTube video by New West Records JD McPherson - "Every Single Christmas" [Lyric Video]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBmb...

I had not seen that! Thank you.

I feel similarly. Although I think in my case I ended up in a weird position in between phonetician and phonologist, which didn't do me any favors for the first 14 years of my career.

There's definitely some overlap with the Port and Leary critique, basically that the IPA is not fit for purpose. I agree with that for a lot of things. But then beyond that level there's even more noise entering the channel, because capsule summaries often ignore exceptions and complexity.

I guess my questions are: (1) am I crazy, or are other people worried about this? (2) how should we treat one-off IPA-level descriptions of phonological phenomena that are difficult or impossible to get new data on? and (3) is there anything we can do as a field about this?

I don't necessarily have a solution to propose. Obviously, gathering your own data where feasible and analyzing it at a competent level of phonetic specificity is optimal. But in many cases that's not feasible. 5/n

I'm biased. You could fairly paraphrase the last 10 years of my career as 'actually, this is quite a bit more phonetically complicated than IPA capsule descriptions make it look'. But my students are not biased, they're just trying to investigate things they've read about in theoretical papers. 4/n

Now I love me some theoretical phonology. But this is a *problem*. These are not peripheral issues, either: they involve things like the need for global evaluation vs. 'myopia', the nature of harmony and spreading, categoricity vs. gradience in allophony, feature theory, etc.3/n

Out of the 7 papers I received that followed this broad approach, 3 found that the original data description was different/more complicated in ways that call into question the theoretical analysis, and 2 more introduced novel data that don't agree with previous descriptions. 2/n