Colloquium: Dr. Jonathan Paramore, "How Abstract Can URs Be?"

Dr. Jonathan Paramore's research investigates how speech representations are learned and organized in the mind.

A central question of phonological theory concerns the substance of long-term memory representations of speech. In this talk, Paramore will investigate the substance of these representations by considering how abstract phonological representations can be. Drawing on air pressure data from two production experiments on Pakistani Punjabi, he argues that phonological representations can be completely covert, containing phonological features that never surface faithfully in any allomorph.

In Pakistani Punjabi, predictably nasal vowels occurring before nasal consonants, [ṼːN], are produced with the same degree of nasality as contrastive nasal vowels, /Ṽː/. However, predictably nasal [ṼːN] and contrastive nasal /Ṽː/ behave differently in their interaction with a nasal harmony process, in that only contrastive nasal /Ṽː/ triggers harmony. Paramore argues that this asymmetry requires an analysis in which (i) pre-nasal vowels are underlyingly oral /VːN/, and  (ii) only underlyingly nasal /Ṽː/ triggers harmony.