We explore the generative capacity of morphological theories of reduplication. We computationally classify theories of reduplication using a hierarchy of string-to-string function classes. Reduplication as a process requires only the regular class of functions. We show that various morphological theories necessarily treat it as a more expressive polyregular function, while others maintain regularity. We discuss the significance of this formal result for reduplicative functions and recognition.

Privative approaches to phonological representations provide a challenge to phonological theory. The main challenge is that ternary phonological behavior appears to require binary features. The laryngeal phonology of Polish demonstrates such ternary behavior (Rubach 1996). We assume modified contrastive specification and add superordinate marking from Purnell, Raimy, and Salmons (2019). These assumptions provide the structure for strictly privative representations to account for ternary phonological behavior. We apply this approach to the laryngeal phonology of Polish and additionally demonstrate the importance of modularity between phonology and phonetics. The end result is a strictly privative approach to phonological representations that accounts for ternary phonological behavior and connects it to aspects of modularity. This approach also serves as a response to substance free phonology by introducing the alternative view of substance impoverished phonology.

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Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, (ii) the proposed analysis improves upon and supersedes similar analyses proposed in Dresher 2015 and Purnell & Raimy 2015, and (iii) the adoption of privative features provides an improved representationally based understanding of phonological activity, feature geometry, and how phonology reflects general cognitive features of memory.*

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Distinctive regional varieties of English have only recently emerged in parts of North America, including Wisconsin, where differences appear to be increasing today. We present an experiment in which listeners heard two short samples each from three Wisconsin regions and three other dialect areas. For each area, one sample was recorded pre-1970 and another recorded post-2010. Regional stereotypes were excluded. In a situation of new and still-emerging regional varieties, we expected listeners to be able to more accurately identify recent speech samples versus old samples from Wisconsin. Listeners proved better at recognizing speakers from Wisconsin in newer over older recordings. This complicates previous discussions of dialect awareness, in particular ‘enregisterment,’ with our listeners able to identify Wisconsin speech even in the absence of salient, known dialect features.

AbstractLinguists in the United States are acutely aware of the need to engage the public about their work in new and better ways. We describe here our effort to take up that challenge in Wisconsin by building a set of outreach projects that connect with communities throughout the state and that focus on issues of importance to particular audiences. Through these projects, we have become convinced that outreach, teaching, and research — treated separately and distinctly for academic evaluation — are inextricably linked, often to the point of being indistinguishable in practice.

1.0 The road to PF Linearization is a commonly used term in many domains of linguistic theory. The purpose of this paper is to clarify what linearization is by demonstrating that it is not a monolithic nor unified operation. Instead, linearization occurs as a by-product of the necessary conversion of representations from one grammatical module to another. The transfer of a representation from one module to another requires a conversion in content since different modules traffic in different representations and concomitant computations. As a starting point, we assume the grammatical organization in (1).

For purposes of professional advancement in college and university departments, academics are required to engage in research, teaching, and service. Researchers often find it easier to segregate their research from teaching and those of us at certain kinds of institutions may neglect service because of its perceived diminished value compared in particular to research. At other institutions, research can be overlooked in favor of teaching and service. This podcast describes two ongoing projects that integrate research, teaching, and service: the Wisconsin Englishes Project, a student-driven investigation of variation and change in regional language patterns, and Wisconsin Speech Chain Online, or WISCO, an online program that helps beginning students master sociophonetic methods and analysis. Along the way, we encourage academics to engage all levels of students to move from novitiate to expert in researching language variation and change. We lay out how we have approached mentoring students from research discovery to outreach and how we have built a network of units on campus for support, such as informational technology.

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