Workshop ‘Nonuniformity in Morphophonology across Frameworks’
Trier (Germany), 10.-11.10.2024
Website: nonuniformityworkshop.uni-trier.de
Nonuniformity among surface forms is a common phenomenon in morphophonology. We use ‘nonuniformity’ here to describe the observation that the phonology of morphologically complex words may vary, even though the words are subject to the same morphological and/or phonological principles.
There is a growing body of recent work which argues that the scope of nonuniformity is not only much wider than is often assumed (cf. e.g. the usage of ‘nonuniformity’ usually attributed to Prince 1993), but that cases of nonuniformity also provide an important window to the nature of the morphology-phonology interface (e.g. Collie 2008, Dabouis 2019, Cohen 2014, Strycharczuk & Scobbie 2016, Ben Hedia & Plag 2017, Arndt-Lappe & Ernestus 2020, Breiss 2021, Zuraw et al. 2021, Bermúdez-Otero 2024). In terms of scope, nonuniformity may affect the realisation of the same word (e.g. by different speakers) or of different words of the same class; it may or may not be constrained by lexical factors (e.g. paradigmatic factors, frequencies); it may manifest itself in terms of discrete phonological alternations (e.g. different stress positions, vowel phonemes) or gradient phonetic effects (e.g. segment durations). At a theoretical level, models of the morphology-phonology interface differ widely in what types of nonuniformity they accommodate, ranging from models explicitly referring to usage and processing as a source of nonuniformity to models delimiting grammatically relevant types of nonuniformity from other types of nonuniformity. In addition, we find that much work on relevant questions is distributed among different research communities (concerned e.g. with phonology, morphology, psycholinguistics) and frameworks.
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in morphophonological nonuniformity of any of the types described above, and to discuss both empirical evidence and theoretical implications across different frameworks and perspectives.
We invite contributions with an empirical and/or theoretical focus that present original research addressing the issues outlined above (regarding scope and theoretical implications of nonuniformity) and related issues. Crucially, contributions should be accessible to an audience coming from different frameworks.
Invited speakers
Canaan Breiss (University of Southern California)
Clara Cohen (University of Glasgow)
Important dates
31.05.2024, Anywhere on Earth Deadline for the submission of abstracts (info cf. below)
15.06.2024 Notification of acceptance
10.-11.10.2024 Conference
Submission information
Please submit an anonymous abstract (pdf, max. 300 words, excluding references and set examples) via EasyAbs:https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/NUiMPhaF24/'
Organisers & contact information
The workshop is part of the research project English Root Stress across Frameworks, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Agence nationale de la recherche (principal investigators: Sabine Arndt-Lappe & Quentin Dabouis).
German project website: ersaf.uni-trier.de
French project website: https://lrl.uca.fr/projet_du_labo/projet-ersaf/
