COLLOQUIUM THIS FRIDAY: ARTO ANTTILA

Arto Anttila, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, will deliver the last Linguistics colloquium of 2007 at 4:30 on Friday, November 30, in the Silverman Conference Room (Stevenson College). His title is “The Role of Prosody in Constituent Structure.” Here is the abstract:

Does phonology influence the ordering of meaningful elements (morphemes, words, phrases)? The answer is often taken to be no, but an investigation into the quantitative distribution of constituents tells a different story. This talk reports the results of a preliminary quantitative study of the English Dative Alternation. Our main conclusion is that prosody plays an active role in constituent linearization in English. The prosodic effects are mostly gradient and variable, yet entirely systematic. We present an optimality-theoretic phonological model that predicts, for each input, what the possible orderings are as well as the quantitative preferences among them.

A potluck will follow at the home of Junko Ito and Armin Mester.