To understand how the cognitive systems responsible for language are structured, it is necessary to determine how different linguistic systems--those governing sound (phonology), meaning (semantics), and structure (morphosyntax)--interact. This grant supports a workshop that brings together researchers working on the interface between structure and sound, and it focuses on two major questions. The first question focuses on how the structure of words affects their phonology. When one set of grammatical features (e.g., third person singular) may have more than one phonological realization in a given language, what conditions how the choice is made? It is widely acknowledged that the way a complex word is structured may limit which of its parts can access other information in other parts, but how those limits are determined differs across several currently prominent theories. The workshop brings together linguists with diverse views on this issue in order to tease apart these predictions for morphologically complex words across languages.
The second and less well-explored question addresses the effects of phonology on the structure of words and sentences. A historically prevalent view is that syntax is "phonology-free," in that syntactic operations are not sensitive to phonological structure (e.g., questions are not formed just because a word starts with the sound [b]). This view, however, is currently being challenged by new theoretical approaches that use advances in corpus and experimental methodologies, and which allow for the investigation of more subtle effects of phonology on syntax than traditional linguistic methods do.
While both of these research questions have received growing attention in the past ten years, little has been done to forge a connection between them. This connection is essential, since our understanding of the morphosyntax-phonology relationship--and the overall architecture of language--relies on an empirically motivated conception of how these components of language interact with each other. One difficulty facing the study of the phonology-syntax relationship is that few individual researchers have the full set of knowledge and skills required for deep investigation at both ends of the interface. This workshop seeks to facilitate progress in this area by bringing together linguists from different subfields and with different theoretical and methodological approaches. It encourages investigations based on novel cross-linguistic, experimental, and corpus data, and has broad potential ramifications for the study of language, psychology, and cognition.
