Salmons & Natvig online lecture

Salmons & Natvig poster

Professors Joe Salmons (UW-Madison Language Sciences) and David Natvig (University of Oslo) will be giving a talk on the Abralimo virtual linguistic lecture platform this weekend.

Sunday 6/21/20

12:00 pm (Central time – note that the time given in the poster is Brazil time)

Title: Sound Change

Sound change is one of the oldest areas of linguistic inquiry but also today an area of vibrant and rapid progress. Current work pursues several very different lines of investigation, including formal phonology, phonetics and variationist theories and methods. In this talk, we argue for the need to integrate phonological theory and phonetics in new ways to understand sound change while taking seriously the notion of ‘structured heterogeneity’. Concretely, speech sounds have clear fundamental structures but also show vast variability, as successive generations of learners and speakers build grammars from rich and diverse input. We draw case studies from laryngeal contrasts, rhotics and vowel systems. In all, we find remarkable variability on the surface, but with fundamental stability in abstract structure. A clearer picture of sound change emerges through investigation and analysis of both the ‘structure’ and the ‘heterogeneity’ of sound patterns. ⠀

Need something to do over the summer? See the full list of online Abralimo lectures here! (Note that you need to press the forward and back buttons at the bottom of the screen to the schedule of lectures for each month.) Lectures are available on many topics, and include quite a few big names in linguistics such as Ray Jackendoff, David Adger, Howard Lasnik, Stephen Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Salikoko Mufwene, Barbara Partee, Diane Lillo-Martin, Frederick Newmeyer, and many many more!