mfm - 18th Manchester Phonology Meeting

This is an archive page; this conference occurred in May 2010.

The site for the 19mfm is available here.

The 18th
Manchester Phonology Meeting

With a special session entitled...

Sociolinguistics, variation and phonology

featuring Andries Coetzee, William Labov,
Marc van Oostendorp and Jane Stuart-Smith

Thursday 20th - Saturday 22nd May 2010

Held at Hulme Hall, Manchester

Organised through a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester and elsewhere.

For information about the mfm and its history and background, see the mfm homepage.

VOLCANIC ASH and BRITISH AIRWAYS STRIKE
We hope that everyone can make it to the 18mfm. Unfortunately, though, it looks like the clouds of volcanic ash and a strike by BA cabin crew may interfere with some flights to the UK around the start of the conference.
The mfm will not be stopped!
We will carry on with as much of the conference as we can and we will assume that everyone will be able to make it unless we hear otherwise. Please let us know if you get delayed.
The organisers will be reading email during the conference, and you can contact the phone number in the email that will be sent to you about this.
We recommend that you check with your airline before travelling. Manchester Airport should have details about the ash situation on its homepage if there are problems.

programme || travel and accommodation || registration + booking || special session

Programme

The final programme for the 18mfm is available here. This contains information about facilities at the conference venue and the restaurants for Thursday and Friday night.

The abstract booklet for the 18mfm is available here.

Registration will begin at 11.30 on Thursday 20th May, the midday meal starts at 12.00, and the main conference events will start at 12.45. The first talk will begin at 1.00. The conference will finish around 5.00pm on Saturday 22nd May. There will be two different poster sessions, one on Friday morning and one on Saturday morning, and there will be two parallel sessions for talks throughout, apart from during the poster sessions and the special session.

Guidance for presenters
As of Monday 17th May, just over 100 people will be attended the 18mfm at some point. It is therefore unlikely that speakers will need more than 60 handouts for the parallel sessions.

Notes for oral-paper-presenters: There will be an OHP in both rooms, and we expect that there will also be a data projector and computer speakers in both rooms, too, although we encourage you not to use a data projector unless it is really necessary. You will need to bring your own laptop if you are using the data projector, and we encourage you to bring handouts, too. There will not be a technician available during the conference to help with computer-assisted presentations, because it would be very expensive to pay for one, so, if you are using a computer for your talk, please make sure that you try out your presentation beforehand, in a meal or coffee break. You will have a 30 minute slot for your presentation and you can choose whether you would rather have 20 minutes to talk and 10 minutes for questions, or 25 minutes to talk and 5 minutes for questions.

Notes for poster-presenters: The poster displays will be set up on the evening before the poster session. You will have a space of about 5' (wide) x 3'9" (high) (152 cm wide x 114 cm high) for your poster. Each person presenting a poster will be provided with the means to affix their posters to the display board. Please feel free to bring handouts with you, so that those viewing your poster also have something to take away. Posters in previous years have taken a wide variety of forms, and there is no one single way to produce a good poster; the important things are that the font size is not too small, that it is easily readable and does not have too much text on it, that it sets out the main points that you want to argue for clearly, and maybe that it's eye catching, too. Some presenters bring one big poster which takes up all the space, others bring a series of A3 or A4 sheets of paper which can be fitted together on the poster board. During your poster session, you will be asked to stand by your poster (for at least a fair amount of the session) as conference participants walk around the displays, read your posters and ask you questions about them.

Registration and booking
It is no longer possible to book for the mfm. Contact patrick.honeybone@ed.ac.uk with any queries.

NB: Some of you will probably also want to stay in Manchester during the evening of Saturday (22nd May). For those that do, it might be nice to meet up for a post-conference meal. Jill Beckman has kindly agreed to organise a trip to a restaurant for the Saturday evening - this will be to the Genghis Khan's Mongolian barbecue restaurant in the centre of Manchester. If you would like to come along to the meal on the 22nd, you will need to email Jill (jill-beckman@uiowa.edu) by 17th May, with "Genghis Khan" in the subject line of your message.

Cancellation policy: we will endeavour to refund any fees paid if you cancel by 17th May. Any cancellations after 17th May may not able to be fully refunded as we will have committed to certain payments on your behalf.

Travel and accommodation

Detailed information on accommodation possibilities and on how to get to the conference (with a selection of maps) are provided on separate pages:

the accommodation page is available here [link removed]
the travel and directions page is available here [also with links to information on Manchester and its many attractions] [link removed]

Special session
A special themed session is being organised for Friday afternoon by members of the organising committee and the advisory board. This will feature the invited speakers listed below (in alphabetical order) and will conclude in an open discussion session when contributions from the audience will be very welcome.

Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan)
William Labov (University of Pennsylvania)
Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens Instituut & Leiden University)
Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow)

Session explanation: Sociolinguistics, variation and phonology

In the past four decades or so, the dialogue between phonological theory and quantitative studies of phonetic and phonological variation has proved an inexhaustible source of insight.

The empirical data collected by sociolinguists provide a crucial testing ground for hypotheses about the fundamental questions of phonology. What is the relative role of discrete and gradient patterns in linguistic sound systems? On what dimensions can phonological change be implemented gradually or abruptly? How much phonological and phonetic information must the lexicon contain? How does frequency affect the representation of phonological knowledge and the implementation of phonological change? To what extent do synchronic grammatical principles constrain the frequency with which variants are used in different contexts? How plastic is phonological knowledge during the life-span of individual speakers?

At the same time, phonological theory has provided explanatory accounts of the patterns of variation observed by sociolinguists. For example, a broad range of observations about English variable /t,d/-deletion have been accounted for in terms of sonority and syllabification, OCP effects, and cyclic derivation. Similarly, in Optimality Theory, predictions about the relative frequencies of variants in different environments have been derived from the typological implications of hypotheses about the universal constraint set.

Our invited speakers will provide different perspectives on this ongoing dialogue between phonology and sociolinguistics.

Organisers

Organising Committee
The first named is the convenor and main organiser. If you have any queries about the conference, feel free to get in touch with me (patrick.honeybone@ed.ac.uk).

Patrick Honeybone (University of Edinburgh)
Ricardo Bermudez-Otero (University of Manchester)

Advisory Board

Adam Albright (MIT)

Jill Beckman (Iowa)

Bert Botma (Leiden)

Mike Davenport (Durham)

Stuart Davis (Indiana)

Jacques Durand (Toulouse-Le Mirail)

Daniel L. Everett (Illinois State)

Paul Foulkes (York)

S.J. Hannahs (Newcastle upon Tyne)

John Harris (UCL)