Booking
Booking was possible until the end of the the working day on 26th May, and is no longer possible. Contact patrick.honeybone@ed.ac.uk with any queries.

Cancellation policy: we will endeavour to refund any fees paid if you cancel by 22nd May. Any cancellations after 22nd 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 30th 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.

Epenthesis

Epenthesis is a microcosm of phonology, illustrating the way in which factors of various sorts have been argued to interact in the genesis of phonological patterns. Some epenthetic segments have been claimed to originate in strategies of gestural phasing that respond to articulatory difficulties: in several Romance varieties, for example, the antagonism between the lingual configurations for [s] and [r] gives rise to epenthetic stops in items like [izdraele] 'Israel'. In other cases, epenthesis has been claimed to be motivated primarily by perceptual factors: for example, in illusory vowels in loanword adaptation, as when a Japanese listener hears a (devoiced) vowel after the released [k] in Russian [tak] 'so'. Furthermore, markedness considerations have been argued to be at play in determining precisely which segments can be epenthesised in particular phonological environments. Regardless of origin, however, epenthesis processes can come to serve overarching structural generalizations in the language: Yawelmani provides a celebrated example, in which [i]-epenthesis conspires with morphologically restricted consonant deletion and other processes in ensuring exhaustive syllabification. Whilst many phonologists may concede that a range of factors play a role in bringing about segment insertion, there is no general consensus on how to integrate them into a unified overall account of epenthesis. Some approaches posit modular architectures of grammar, in which discrete phonological categories and their continuous articulatory and auditory realizations are encoded at different levels of representation. Other theories import phonetic information into categorical phonology, either in the shape of gesture-based phonological representations or of phonological constraints referring to perceptual discriminability. Similarly, there is no agreement on the extent to which autonomous phonological principles and representations retain an explanatory role: thus, we may agree that a certain instance of epenthesis serves to attain phonotactic well- formedness, and yet not agree on whether the relevant phonotactic generalization should be stated in terms of syllable structure, sonority scales, etc.

The participants in this special session will address such important issues on the basis of a range of instances of epenthesis in the languages of the world, and other relevant data.

Invited speakers (in alphabetical order)

Iris Berent (Northeastern University)
Louis Goldstein (University of Southern California)
Nancy Hall (California State University, Long Beach)
Christian Uffmann (University of Duesseldorf)