26.1832, Confs: Phonology/France

Mon Apr 6 21:30:40 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1832. Mon Apr 06 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1832, Confs: Phonology/France

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Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2015 17:30:22
From: Ora Matushansky [o.m.matushansky at uu.nl]
Subject: Computation & Learnability: Implications for Phonology

Computation & Learnability: Implications for Phonology 

Date: 18-Apr-2015 - 18-Apr-2015 
Location: Paris, France 
Contact: Giorgio Magri 
Contact Email: magrigrg at gmail.com 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology 

Meeting Description: 

GLOW Workshop 
Paris, April 18, 2015

The implications of computation and learnability for phonological theory

Organizers:

Giorgio Magri, Michela Russo, 
Mohamed Lahrouchi, Joaquim Brandao de Carvalho

Crystallizing a widespread feeling, Mark van Oostendorp recently writes: ''It is fair to say that we know much more about sound patterns in human language than people did at the beginning of the 20th Century. At the same time, many phonologists seem to feel that we have not yet reached the standards of some of the 'hard' sciences.'' A clear obstacle to progress seems to be the fact that competing phonological theories are underdetermined by sheer typological and linguistic data. Moving beyond descriptive adequacy, Alan Prince thus proposes that ''rational arguments about two theories' comparative success […] depend on a broad assessment of their properties.'' Among the formal properties of a phonological theory which are becoming crucial for its comparative assessment are its computability and learnability properties. 

This workshop thus aims at investigating the implications of computation and learnability for phonological theory. The issues addressed include (but are not limited to): the computability/intractability of phonological grammars and the debate among derivational, representational, and constraint-based frameworks; learnability guarantees and the debate between competing modes of constraint interaction; the characterization of phonological patterns within the sub-regular hierarchy and the expressive power of phonological formalisms; the learnability filter and its implications for the evaluation of the typologies predicted by competing phonological theories; methods for constraint induction and the problem of grounding phonology into phonetics; the impact of statistical methods and the divide between categorical and gradient models of phonological competence; the learnability of phonological processes conditioned by prosodic domains and its implications for the syntax/phonology interfac
 e. The workshop adopts an inclusive perspective, open to any computational approach and any phonological framework. 

Invited speakers: TBA 

9:45-10:15
Welcome

10:15-10:45 
Robert Daland 
Even Though the Sound of It Is Really Quite Atrocious: Finiteness and Well-Defined Probabilities in Phonotactic Learning

10:45-11:15  
Thomas Graf and Jeffrey Heinz
Commonality in Disparity: The Computational View of Syntax and Phonology

11:15-11:45 Coffee Break

11:45-12:15  
Juliet Stanton
The Learnability Filter and Its Role in the Comparison of Metrical Theories

12:15-12:45 
Stephanie Shih
Super Additive Phonological Similarity as Constraint Conjunction

12:45-13:15 
Jane Chandlee, Jeffrey Heinz, and Adam Jardine 
Representing and Learning Opaque Maps with Strictly Local Functions

13:15-14:45 Lunch Break

14:45-15:15  
Coral Hughto, Joe Pater, and Robert Staubs  
Grammatical Agent-Based Modeling of Typology

15:15-15:45 
Gaja Jarosz
Phonotactic Probability and Sonority Sequencing in Polish Initial Clusters 

15:45-16:15  
Ewan Dunbar, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Emmanuel Dupoux 
On the Origin of Features: Quantitative Methods for Comparing Representations

16:15-16:45 Coffee Break

16:45-17:15  
Afton Coombs
Gradient Lengthening Effects: Evidence from Tagalog

17:15-17:45 
Klaas Seinhorst  
Inductive Biases in Plosive Inventories: an Empirical Approach

17:45-18:30  
Invited Speaker: Bruce Tesar
Learnability and Phonological Maps

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