mfm - 20th Manchester Phonology Meeting

This is an archive page; this conference occurred in May 2012.

The site for the 21mfm is available here.

The 20th
Manchester Phonology Meeting

Twentieth anniversary meeting

With a special session entitled...

Unsolved Problems in Phonology

featuring Jacques Durand, Sharon Inkelas, Donca Steriade and Nina Topintzi

Thursday 24th - Saturday 26th May 2012

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.

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

Programme
The (hopefully) final version of the programme for the 20mfm is available here, containing some information about the venue and the area around it, including details of a nearby copy shop. The programme contains sad news about Donca Steriade's invited talk.

20mfm programme

The abstracts booklet is available here:

20mfm abstracts booklet

You might also be interested in the mfm FRINGE meeting on Segmental Architecture, which is not part of the mfm, but is timed to fit around it, on Wednesday 23rd May.

Registration will begin at 11.30 on Thursday 24th May, the midday meal starts at 12.00, and the main conference events will start at 12.45, with the conference opening. The first talk will begin at 1.00. The conference will finish at 4.45pm on Saturday 26th 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 18th May, around 120 people are registered to attend the 20mfm at some point (but not everyone overlaps as some will not be there all the time). It is therefore unlikely that speakers will need more than 60 handouts for the parallel sessions, but your guess is as good as ours about this.

Notes for oral-paper-presenters: 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. There will be a data projector and computer speakers in both rooms, although we encourage you to bring handouts even if you are projecting your presentation. You will need to bring your own laptop if you are using the data projector. 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.

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.

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 travel and directions page is available here [also with links to information on Manchester and its many attractions]
advice on where to stay in Manchester is available here

Registration and booking
As the advertised deadline has now passed, it is no longer possible to book for the 20mfm.

There will be a pre-conference get-together on Wednesday 23rd from 8.30pm in the Lass O'Gowrie pub (36 Charles Street, M1 7DB), organised by Patrycja Strycharczuk.

For the evening of the 26th, Jill Beckman has organised a trip to the Genghis Khan Mongolian Barbecue restaurant.

Cancellation policy: we will endeavour to refund any fees paid if you cancel by 14th May. Any cancellations after 14th May may not able to be fully refunded as we will have committed to certain payments on your behalf.

Special session
A special themed session is being organised for Friday 25th May by members of the organising committee and the advisory board. This will feature invited speakers, including those listed below, and will allow for open discussion when contributions from the audience will be very welcome.

Unsolved Problems in Phonology
The fact that the mfm is celebrating its twentieth anniversary has encouraged us to take stock of what phonology has achieved - and how much it has really progressed - in recent decades. We have therefore decided that the topic of the 20mfm will be "Unsolved Problems in Phonology", and we have invited a number of colleagues to discuss a key puzzle for phonological theory.

We have asked them to focus on problems for which there once was a solution that commanded widespread agreement within the phonological community, but where such consensus has since, for one reason or another, collapsed. In this sense, we are interested in how a "solved" problem can become "unsolved", with all that this implies for questions such as the causes of agreement and disagreement in the phonological community, and the extent of progress in phonological research. And, of course, we have chosen problems that we believe are all interesting in their own right.

The topics that we have asked our invited speakers to address are:
Jacques Durand, Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail: latent consonants [20th Anniversary Honorary Guest Speaker, as a founder of the mfm]
Sharon Inkelas, University of California, Berkeley: nonderived environment blocking
Donca Steriade, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: segment sequencing
Nina Topintzi, Universitaet Leipzig: compensatory lengthening

Organisers

Organising Committee
The first named is the convenor and main organiser - if you would like to attend or if you have any queries about the conference, please 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)

Paul Boersma (Amsterdam)

Bert Botma (Leiden)

Mike Davenport (Durham)

Stuart Davis (Indiana)

Laura Downing (ZAS)

Mark Hale (Concordia)

S.J. Hannahs (Newcastle upon Tyne)

Kristine A. Hildebrandt (Southern Illinois)