Title
Nanovariation in Phonological Adjacency and Iterativity

Andrew Nevins (Harvard)

Date:  30.03.2006

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

Description
In this paper we three cases of microvariation: [ATR] vowel harmony in Canadian French, k-dissimilation in Kikuyu, and [back] harmony in Hungarian. All three exhibit massive inter- and intra-speaker variation in non-local environments of rule-application, which we model as the result of ambiguity in analysis of the local data. We model the variation as the result of choosing
the most preferred grammars within a hypothesis space.