General Linguistics Colloquium (SoSe 2025)

This talk...

The essentialist thesis of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam takes the truth of necessary a posteriori propositions as one of its main premises. The latter requires that both proper names and general names be rigid designators. The rigidity of general names for natural kinds has stimulated much wider debates than that of proper names.

Applying the indeterminacy thesis to the whole process of natural kind terms’ reference-fixing, Chenyang Li argues that natural kind terms are not rigid designators and then it is unwarranted that there is necessary a posteriori truths about natural kinds.

My aim in this paper is to explain the indeterminacy phenomena in fixing the reference of natural kind terms articulated by Li, to argue that natural kind terms are rigid in a relative sense, and to elaborate their rigidity mechanism. In section I, I will examine Li’s argument in detail and present his conventionalist conception of natural kind terms’ reference. Then in section II, I will clarify the indeterminacy thesis and argue in what sense terms are determinate. Finally in section III, I will illuminate the rigidity mechanism of natural kind terms and defend an updated version of the causal theory.

This talk...

In this talk, I will discuss the directionality of contextual allomorphy in pronouns. Number-driven allo- morphy of person morphemes has been approached from various perspectives in the literature (Moskal 2015, 2018; Harbour 2016; Smith et al. 2019; Zompì 2023). The opposite direction, in which the realization of plural morphemes is sensitive to person features, has not been investigated before. On the basis of a balanced cross- linguistic sample of 335 languages, I show that both directions in allomorphic conditioning are possible. This creates a puzzle for the view that only one direction is available, as proposed in Bobaljik (2000). The present study addresses the question of how the empirical finding that both directions are found informs the overall theory of allomorphy and the morphology-syntax interface.

When singing in tone languages, in some traditions, singers ensure that there is a sort of match, or systematic correspondence, between the pitch movements of speech (tone) and the pitch movements of the musical melody. For instance, given a fall in speech tone, they may prefer to set it to a fall in musical melody, tolerate setting it to flat melody, and avoid setting it to a rising melody. This aspect of text-setting is known as tone-melody matching.

From the late nineteenth century onward, tone-melody matching has been described and analyzed in various traditions, including Cantonese (Chan 1987), Ewe (Schneider 1961), Navajo (Herzog 1934), Vietnamese (Kirby and Ladd 2016), and many others. Research on those traditions has yielded a number of insights, especially over the last three decades, and it is becoming increasingly clear which features of tone-melody matching are ubiquitous, which are rare, etc. In other words, a typology of tone-melody matching is emerging. The progress is clear from recent overviews of the field (e.g. Kirby and Ladd 2020) and exemplary studies of individual traditions (e.g. McPherson and Ryan 2018), both of which include extensive references.

In my presentation, I introduce tone-melody matching in general, then provide a preliminary case study of ancient Greek vocal music. While tone-melody matching in ancient Greek has certainly received some scholarly attention, esp. in the late nineteenth century (e.g. Crusius 1894, Wackernagel 1896), it has hardly been considered from a typological perspective (the main exception being Devine and Stephens 1994). The case study aims to get at two main questions. First, how does tone-melody matching work in ancient Greek vocal music? Second, how is tone-melody matching in ancient Greek similar and different from tone-melody matching in other traditions, e.g. in Cantonese pop music or in Tommo So folk song?

Works cited
Chan, Marjorie K. M. 1987. “Tone and melody interaction in Cantonese and Mandarin songs.” UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 68: 132–169.
Crusius, Otto. 1894. Die Delphischen Hymnen: Untersuchungen über Texte und Melodien. (Ergänzungsheft zum Philologus, 53). Göttingen: Dieterich.
Devine, A. M., and Laurence D. Stephens. 1994. The Prosody of Greek Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herzog, George. 1934. “Speech-melody and primitive music.” The Musical Quarterly 20.4: 452–466.
Kirby, James, and D. Robert Ladd. 2016. “Tone-melody correspondence in Vietnamese popular song.” Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages: 48–51.
——. 2021. “Tone-melody matching in tone-language singing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody, ed. Carlos Gussenhoven and Aoju Chen, 676–688. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McPherson, Laura, and Kevin M. Ryan. 2018. “Tone-Tune Association in Tommo So (Dogon) Folk Songs.” Language 94.1: 119–156.
Schneider, Marius. 1943. “Phonetische und metrische Korrelationen bei gesprochenen und gesungenen Ewe-Texten.” Archiv für vergleichende Phonetik 7: 1–15.
Wackernagel, Jakob. 1896. “Das Zeugniss der delphischen Hymnen über den griechischen Accent.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, N. S. 51: 304–305.

This talk...

This talk...

This talk...

This talk...

This talk...

This talk...

This talk explores the possibilities of integrating insights from Emergent Phonology (Archangeli & Pulleyblank 2022) and Gradient Symbolic Architecture (e.g. Smolensky & Goldrick 2016). I develop a variant of Emergent Grammar with singleton morph sets where morphs may include gradient specifications. Gradience forces us to reintroduce faithfulness, but only in the sense of coping with differences in activity levels >0. In the talk I motivate the architecture of the theory and illustrate its workings and some of its consequences by looking at examples from Vedic Sanskrit.

This talk...