Call for papers
Many languages have phonological systems which treat differently parts of the lexicon, with subdivisions that do not necessarily correspond to different morphological structures or to different syntactic categories. Such sublexica often emerge through language contact, as in Japanese (Itô & Mester 1995, 1999), in which native (Yamato) words have different phonological properties than Sino-Japanese loanwords. For example, Yamato words do not have sequences of a nasal followed by a voiceless obstruent, but such structures may be found in Sino-Japanese words (cp. Yamato / šin-te/ → [šinde] ‘die-gerund’ vs. Sino-Japanese /šin-tai/ → [šintai] ‘body’). Such systems have been observed for a long time and in a variety of languages such as Turkish (Lees 1961), Mohawk (Postal 1968) or English (Chomsky & Halle 1968).
However, synchronically, those subsets of the lexicon have different behaviours which cannot be attributed to knowledge of etymological information. Therefore, one first question that such systems raise is how they may be learned: what are the cues that language users employ to categorize words into different sublexica? Those cues are likely to be of different natures (e.g. phonotactic, morphological, semantic), and so it is possible that sublexica are made up of a combination of properties on different linguistic levels. This has been argued to be the case, for example, in English (Dabouis & Fournier 2022), but is it always the case that parts of the lexicon that have a distinct phonological behaviour have different morphological, graphophonological (if the language has an orthographic system) or semantic properties?
Sometimes, such systems may be described using a core-periphery structure, as proposed by Itô & Mester (1995): there is a kind of hierarchy among lexical items, with native words at the core and increasingly unassimilated loans towards the periphery. In this model, some constraints apply across the whole lexicon, while others only apply in words that are closer to the core, so that less established loanwords may violate more constraints than established loanwords, which themselves may violate more constraints than native words. How general is this core-periphery structure across languages? Are there languages which do not organize their sublexica in that fashion?
References
Chomsky, N. & Halle, M. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
Dabouis, Q. & Fournier, P. (2022). English PhonologiES? In V. Arigne & C. Rocq-Migette (Eds.), Modèles et modélisation en linguistique / Models and Modelisation in Linguistics (pp. 215–258). Bruxelles, Belgique: Peter Lang.
Itô, J. & Mester, A. (1995). The core-periphery structure of the lexicon and constraints on reranking. In J. Beckman, L. Dickey, & S. Urbanczyk (Eds.), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18: Papers in Optimality Theory (pp. 181–209). Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Itô, J. & Mester, A. (1999). The phonological lexicon. The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, 62–100.
Lees, R. B. (1961). The Phonology of Modern Standard Turkish. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Postal, P. M. (1968). Aspects of phonological theory. New York: Harper & Row.
We welcome contributions for oral presentations on the 28th of May 2025 that will seek to answer some of those questions using data from any language and any theoretical framework. The Fringe Meeting will be concluded by a general discussion among presenters and the public. The deadline for abstracts is 10th February 2025 20th February 2025.
Submissions should be one A4 page long excluding references (12 pt, Times New Roman, 2,54 cm margins). They should be anonymous and be submitted as PDF files.
The abstracts will be evaluated in double-blind peer review and selected based on their relevance to the theme of the Fringe Meeting and the quality of the contribution.
Abstracts should be submitted on this website. Note that you have to create an account on the Sciencesconf platform if you do not have one already. Then you should be able to see a section called “My submissions” where you should be able to submit your abstract.
MFM 2025 website : http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/31mfm.html
Information about the venue : the Fringe Meeting will take place at the University of Manchester, in the Samuel Alexander building, room A101 (https://tinyurl.com/mr43rwk7).
Picture of the front of the Samuel Alexander building : https://tinyurl.com/3k7yxemv
PDF map of the campus, the Samuel Alexander building is N. 67 : https://tinyurl.com/33t3vsa4
Loading... 
