Thursday, February 6, 2020
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM (ET)
CHS CHS 104 Chase Auditorium
Event Type
Lecture
Contact
Distinguished Visitors Program
Link
https://ems-web.haverford.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=81043
Adam Jardine, assistant professor of linguistics, Rutgers University
Hyman (2011) states that "anyone who is interested in the outer limits of what is possible in phonology would ... be well-served to understand how tone systems work." Phonological tone is thus an important empirical target for theoretical computational phonology, which studies the computational laws that delineate possible phonological patterns from impossible ones (Heinz 2018). In this talk, I survey results showing that computationally, tone is distinct from segmental phonology. I then show that, in understanding this difference, we find evidence for older notions of how tone is represented, but from a new, detailed perspective that also makes progress towards answering the question of how phonological patterns are learned. In sum, computational phonology has much to learn from tone, and phonological theory has much to learn from the computational study of tone.
Dr. Jardine earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Delaware in 2016 and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He publishes widely in both linguistics journals (Phonology, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics) and the proceedings of theoretical computer science conferences (ICGI, LATA, MoL). At Rutgers he has established a research group in computational and mathematical linguistics that has already produced significant results in the formal study of phonology and phonological learning.
Tea at 4:15 p.m.
Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics in conjunction with the Early Career Scholars Fund and the Provost's Office