The Twenty-Seventh Manchester Phonology Meeting ABSTRACTS BOOKLET Thursday 23rd - Saturday 25th May 2019 Held at UMIC, Manchester Organised by a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, and elsewhere. This booklet contains the abstracts for all the papers presented at the twenty-seventh Manchester Phonology Meeting, held at Hulme Hall, Manchester, in May 2019. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order by the surname of the (first named) presenter. The abstracts for the oral paper sessions are presented first, followed by the abstracts for the poster paper sessions, and the booklet concludes with abstracts for the special session. The final programme, included in your registration pack and available on the conference website, gives the details of which papers are in which room, and at which times. Oral papers Are phonotactically unusual words ‘exceptions’? Adam Albright, MIT ([email protected]) A growing body of work has advanced the hypothesis that grammatical restrictions may be gradient. In the domain of static phonotactic restrictions, this includes OCP place in Arabic (Frisch, Pierrehumbert and Broe 2004), transparent vowels in Hungarian (Hayes and Londe 2006), sonority sequencing in English (Daland et al. 2011), and numerous others. Support generally comes from probabilistic generalization: speakers are more likely accept or produce novel items that conform. Less attention has been paid to the status of existing words that fail to conform. Under the gradient grammatical analysis, these are exceptions. Implementations vary considerably, but most approaches to exceptions rely on listing morpheme-specific information, which blocks or exempts them from the regular grammar. The consequences of the distinction between morpheme-specific listedness vs. default status have been explored extensively for morphology, and somewhat for morphophonological regularity, but very little for phonotactic regularity. One robust finding is that irregular forms rely on high token frequency to resist regularization. Thus, a basic question is: are low frequency forms more phonotactically regular? To answer this question, I investigated the relation between phonotactic regularity and token frequency in the English lexicon. The first set of tests examined -5 overall phonotactic probability: do improbable words require high frequency? Three metrics were calcu- -10 lated: transitional bigram probability, natural class- based bigram probability (Albright 2009), and maxent -15 harmony using the UCLA Phonotactic Learner (Hayes and Wilson 2008). All three metrics were calculated us- -20 ing CELEX lemmas as training data. Since phonotac- Trans Prob Log Bigram tic probability correlates with word length (transitional probability decreases, opportunity for constraint viola- -25 tions increases), and frequent words tend to be shorter, 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 the test was confined to monosyllabic lemmas. Similar Log frequency (Cobuild) results obtained for all three models, illustrated here for bigram transitional probability: phono- tactic probability shows an essentially linear positive correlation with frequency (p<.0001). That is, low frequency words are phonotactically less regular, contrary to predictions. This result accords with the claim that high frequency words reduce over time (Pierrehum- bert 2001; etc.), yielding a specific type of regularization. To test the irregularity hypothesis more generally, I examined the distribution of exceptions to a set of markedness constraints, in- cluding coda conditions and general inventory constraints against voiced obstruents, fricatives, and clusters. Phonotactic regularity was assessed in two ways. The first was adherence to gen- eral markedness asymmetries (*RҩңҝҟҞ ?ҩҞқ). Second, the Minimal Generalization Learner (Albright and Hayes 2001) was trained to predict features of interest, and then ‘wug tested’ on existing words, to identify words for which the grammar preferred the incorrect output. As above, the relation between frequency and probability of irregularity was examined. The results are mixed. In coda position, many features do show a tendency towards greater regularity at lower frequencies; however, in initial position, the opposite holds. Thus, the results again run counter to the prediction that low frequency words should be systematically more regular. What do these results mean for the hypothesis that grammar contains gradient preferences, with many exceptions? One possibility is that overregularization is weaker for phonotactics than for morphological inflection, especially in languages with standard orthographies. I also consider the possibility that phonotactic irregulars do not rely on blocking in the morphological sense, but rather are ‘phonological idioms’, evaluated non-compositionally (Futrell et al. 2017). Labiodentalization in Faifi Arabic Abdullah Alfaifi & Stuart Davis, Indiana University [email protected]; [email protected] Honeybone (2016) arGues that a chanGe from an interdental to a labiodental is reasonably well attested as a regular endogenous (internally-motivated) sound change but the opposite change of a labiodental to an interdental is not. As Honeybone reports, the sound chanGe of interdentals to labiodentals has been attested in some Arabic dialects such as an unconditioned chanGe in southern Anatolian Siirt Arabic where all interdentals become labiodentals. Besides the cases in Honeybone (2016), Alfaifi & Behnstedt (2010:56) mention that in a Faifi Arabic variety spoken in southwest Saudi Arabia the interdental emphatic (pharynGealized) /ðʕ/ can be realized as [f], while /θ/ and /ð/ remain unchanGed. But, Alfaifi & Behnstedt do not provide details nor offer an explanation for labiodentalization. To be clear, Faifi Arabic (henceforth, FA) and its subvarieties are understudied with the Alfaifi & Behnstedt’s (2010) article First Notes on the Dialect of Gabal Fayfa’ probably being the only publication on the dialect. In this paper we provide data that documents labiodentalization in a different subvariety of FA and posit a reason for its occurrence. FA has 3 phonemic emphatic consonants: /tˤ/, /sˤ/, /ðˤ/. The emphatic stop /tˤ/ is realized very similarly to what is found in other dialects. The realization of /sˤ/ and /ðˤ/, however, are unique and include apparent allophonic pronunciation of [st] for /sˤ/ (not discussed here) and [θ] and [f] for /ðˤ/. The realizations of [θ] and [f] from underlyinG emphatics will be the focus of this paper. Our data are based on the intuitions of one of the co-authors in consultation with other native speakers of the FA dialect. The FA emphatic /ðˤ/ is often realized as [ðˤ], but when it is the first consonant of a root it can be realized as voiceless (nonpharyngealized) [θ]. The voiceless interdental realization only occurs with FA words where /ðˤ/ is cognate with Classical Arabic (CA) /ðˤ/. The general observation is that non-emphatic voiceless [θ] is the realization of /ðˤ/ when the nucleus of the syllable (or followinG syllable) is [i]: /ðˤifr-in/ → [θif.rin] ‘a fingernail’, /m-ðˤahir/ → [mθa.hir] ‘the back’. If the vowels of the first two syllables are both low, the root-initial emphatic still devoices but does not depharyngealize (eg, /ʔaðˤfaar-in/ → [ʔaθˤ.faa.rin] ‘fingernails’, /ðˤamaaj- in/ → [θˤa.maa.jin] ‘thirst’). When /ðˤ/ is not the first root-consonant it is resistant to this alternation, as in /maħfaðˤ-ah/ → [maħ.fa.ðˤah] *[maħ.fa.θˤah] ‘a wallet’. Instances of FA root- initial /ðˤ/ that are cognate with CA /dˤ/ are almost always obligatorily realized as depharynGealized [f], exactly like the realization of the labiodental phoneme /f/. Labiodentalization can be observed in words like /ðˤabʕ-in/ → [fab.ʕin] ‘a hyena’ and /m-aðˤlaaʕ/ → [maf.laaʕ] ‘the ribs’. In cases when the FA /ðˤ/ that is cognate with CA /dˤ/ is not root-initial, it is always realized as [ðˤ], exemplified by /Gaaðˤ-in/ → [gaa.ðˤin] *[Gaa.fin] ‘a judge’. Thus, while the distinction between historical /ðˤ/ and /dˤ/ have neutralized to [ðˤ] in FA in non root-initial position, the distinction is maintained in root-initial position where words with historical /ðˤ/ can have a devoiced interdental as a reflex (but not [f]), while words with historical /dˤ/ can have [f] as a reflex (but not a devoiced interdental). One interestinG question concerns the source of FA labiodentalization where [f] is the reflex of historic *dˤ, a sound that otherwise has the reflex [ðˤ] in FA. Watson & Al Azraqi (2011) note that in areas adjacent to where FA is spoken, the pronunciation of historic /dˤ/ is an emphatic lateral fricative [ɮˤ]. Given that /ðˤ/ undergoes devoicing (and depharyngealization) in FA when in root-initial position, we posit that in older FA, historic /dˤ/ was pronounced as [ɮˤ] and underwent devoicinG transforminG it into a voiceless lateral fricative. Because of the perceptual similarity between a voiceless lateral fricative and labiodental [f], we posit that listeners heard it as the FA phoneme [f]. We conclude by maintaining that the path to labiodentalization in FA does not go directly throuGh an interdental staGe as in other Arabic varieties but throuGh the misperception of a voiceless lateral fricative as labiodental [f], thus providinG a new source for labiodentalization. The representation of ternary stress pattern in Italo-Romance languages Laura Bafile - University of Ferrara [email protected] Ternary stress pattern of Standard Italian and Italian dialects (henceforth Italian) is a well-known