Anne Pycha
Linguistics
Department, UC Berkeley
pycha at
News
I
filed my dissertation on May 16, 2008 and can no longer call myself a graduate
student. Phew! Starting in September, I will be a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
at the
Professional
interests
Theoretical
phonology, experimental phonology and phonetics, morphology
CV
Available in PDF format here
Research
My
research goal is to characterize length in the sound patterns of
language, and in particular to show how a) the role of length extends beyond quantal units (such as segments or moras) to encompass both
morpheme edges as well as entire morphemes and b) lengthening processes differ
crucially in the realms of phonetics versus phonology. I am committed to
pursuing these issues with theoretical argumentation, cross-linguistic data,
and creative experimental methodologies.
Dissertation: Morphological Sources of Phonological Length
This
study presents and defends Resizing Theory, whose claim is that the overall
size of a morpheme can serve as a
basic unit of analysis for phonological alternations. Morphemes can increase
their size by any number of strategies -- epenthesizing
new segments, for example, or devoicing an existing segment (and thereby
increasing its phonetic duration) -- but it is the fact of an increase, and not
the particular strategy used to implement it, which is linguistically
significant. Resizing Theory has some overlap with theories of fortition and
lenition, but differs in that it uses the independently-verifiable parameter of
size in place of an ad-hoc concept of “strength” and thereby encompasses a much
greater range of phonological alternations. The theory makes three major
predictions, each of which is supported with cross-linguistic evidence. First,
seemingly disparate phonological alternations can achieve identical
morphological effects, but only if they trigger the same direction of change in
a morpheme’s size. Second, morpheme interactions can take complete control over
phonological outputs, determining surface outputs when traditional features and
segments fail to do so. Third and finally, null morpheme realizations are not
special cases warranting special analyses, but instead exist along a cline with
partial and full morpheme realizations. By integrating well-established facts
about phonetic duration directly into the abstract unit of morpheme size, this
study solves several outstanding problems that traditional phonological
constituents cannot handle, and makes a contribution to the literature on both
the phonetics-phonology and phonology-morphology interfaces. (read more)
Peer-reviewed publications
Pycha, A. (2008, to
appear). Lengthened affricates as a test case for the phonetics-phonology
interface. Accepted for publication in Journal
of the International Phonetic Association. (abstract) (pre-publication version)
Pycha, A., Inkelas, S., & Sprouse, R.
(2007). Morphophonemics and the lexicon: a case study from Turkish.
In M.J.
Solé, P. Beddor, & M. Ohala (eds.) Experimental Approaches to Phonology (pp 369-385).
Additional
publications
Pycha, A. (To appear). Morpheme co-occurrence
restrictions in Hupa and beyond. In T. Fernald & S. Tuttle
(eds.) Working Papers in Athabaskan Languages, No. 7.
Pycha, A. (2007). Phonetic vs. phonological lengthening in affricates. Proceedings of the
16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences,1757-1760.
(peer-reviewed conference paper)
Pycha, A. (2006). A duration-based solution to the
problem of stress realization in Turkish. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report,
141-151.
Pycha, A., Shin, E., & Shosted, R. (2006). Directionality of
assimilation in consonant clusters: An experimental approach. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report,
152-166.
Pycha, A. (2005, to appear). Partial blocking. Proceedings of the
Pycha, A., Nowak, P., Shin, E., & Shosted,
R. (2003). Phonological
rule-learning and its implications for a theory of vowel harmony. In G.
Garding &
M. Tsujimura (eds.). Proceedings of the West Coast
Conference on Formal Linguistics 22. (pp 423-435)