<OT> Call for papers: 11th Manchester Phonology Meeting

[Patrick Honeybone]

SECOND AND FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

Eleventh Manchester Phonology Meeting

22-24 MAY 2003

Deadline for abstracts: Sunday 23 February 2003

Special session: 'Historical Phonology and Phonological Theory'

Held at the University of Manchester, UK; organised in collaboration with Edge Hill College, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Universite Toulouse-Le Mirail and the Universite Montpellier-Paul Valery

Conference website: http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/acadepts/humarts/english/11mfm.html

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BACKGROUND
We are pleased to announce our Eleventh Manchester Phonology Meeting (11mfm). For the past ten years, this meeting has been one of the key conferences for phonologists from all corners of the world. In an informal atmosphere, we discuss a wide range of topics, including the phonological description of languages, phonological theory, phonological acquisition, phonological change and the interface between phonology and neighbouring disciplines (phonetics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, etc.) We therefore invite abstracts for full papers or poster presentations from phonologists, phoneticians, psychologists, sociolinguists, computational linguists - in short, anyone interested in exploring current models of phonological theory and the (cognitive, phonetic, sociological, computational...) implications of such work. Presentations on a variety of languages are welcome. Full papers will last around 30 minutes with around 10 minutes for questions, and the poster session is a key part of the mfm, lasting one and a half hours, with a carefully limited number of posters. 

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SPECIAL SESSION 
There is no conference theme - abstracts can be submitted on anything, but, following the success of such sessions in previous years, a special themed session has been organised for Friday afternoon by Ricardo Bermudez-Otero (Newcastle), Patrick Honeybone (Edge Hill) and Nigel Vincent (Manchester). This will feature invited speakers and will conclude in an open discussion session when contributions from the audience will be very welcome. 

SESSION TITLE: 'Historical Phonology And Phonological Theory'
Historical perspectives have long helped to shape phonological theory, and historical phonologists have long sought to test the validity of theoretical models using data from phonological change. There is, for example, a long tradition of enquiry that uses evidence from historical change (e.g. processes of lenition) to probe the nature and structure of phonological representations. The importance that theoretical phonologists have placed on historical data has varied over the years, but it is currently proving to be uniquely relevant to theoretical debates in several phonological fields. Diachronic evidence has a direct bearing on the nature and status of markedness constraints, which take on a central role in the phonological grammar in the model of Optimality Theory; however, several critics of OT have argued that markedness generalizations are in fact mere epiphenomena of recurrent processes of diachronic change, and, as these are driven by performance factors, they should be excluded from 'phonology' proper. For other authors, these performance factors are the direct base of phonology. It is also the case that the rise of strictly parallel approaches to the morphology-phonology interface, such as OT, has posed a challenge to long-accepted views of the life cycle of phonological patterns, according to which rules tend to rise from lower to higher phonological strata in the course of their historical evolution. These are some of the issues that will be addressed in the session, along with the discussion of our speakers' diachronic data. 

SPEAKERS (in alphabetical order): 
* Mark Hale (Concordia) 
* Paul Kiparsky (Stanford) 
* Aditi Lahiri (Konstanz) 
* April McMahon (Sheffield) 

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ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Abstracts for the 11mfm should be sent to Patrick Honeybone by email (honeybop@edgehill.ac.uk) by **23rd February 2003**. Abstracts should be no longer than one side of A4, with 2.5cm or one inch margins, single-spaced, with a font size no smaller than 12 and with normal character spacing. All examples and references in the abstract should be included on the one single page, but it is enough, when referring to previous work, to cite "Author (Date)" without giving full bibliographical details. Please send two copies of your abstract - one of these should be anonymous and one should include your name, affiliation and email. Use one of these formats: Word, pdf, or plain text. If you need to use a phonetic font in your abstract, use the SILdoulos93 font, which can be downloaded for free from this site: http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa2.html. 

Submission of your abstract will be acknowledged by email. Please feel free to get in touch if you are worried that it has not been received.

*Further details* concerning abstract submission are available on the conference website - please make sure that you consult these before submitting an abstract:
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/acadepts/humarts/english/11mfm.html

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ORGANISERS 
This is the mfm organising committee. The first named is the main organiser - if you would like to attend or if you have any queries please feel free to get in touch (honeybop@edgehill.ac.uk, or phone  +44 (0)1695 584244). 

* Patrick Honeybone (Edge Hill College of Higher Education) 
* Ricardo Bermudez-Otero (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) 
* Wiebke Brockhaus-Grand (University of Manchester) 
* Philip Carr (Universite de Montpellier - Paul Valery) 
* Jacques Durand (Universite de Toulouse - Le Mirail) 
* Nigel Vincent (University of Manchester)