Donca Steriade (MIT): Lectures on Greek, Latin, and Romance phonology

Prof. Donca Steriade will give three public lectures at Berkeley on April 15-17.

"The role of free bases in cyclic phonology"
Colloquium lecture

Monday, April 15
3-4:30 pm
370 Dwinelle Hall

Abstract: The symptom indicating that a phonological process applies cyclically is the fact that it produces asymmetric similarities between Bases and their Derivatives. A cyclic process applies in a Base to satisfy Markedness at minimal Faithfulness costs, but it over– or underapplies in the Derivative, producing less Markedness satisfaction than possible or more Faithfulness violation than necessary: it does all this to create a more similar Base-Derivative pair than can be obtained by normal application (Benua 1997).

In this talk, I re-examine a debated hypothesis about cyclic processes, the Free Base Generalization (FBG). The FBG states that a cyclic Base must be a freely occurring expression, a phrase or a free-standing word (Benua 1997, Kager 1999; Kenstowicz 1996; cf. Bermúdez-Otero 2010, Kiparsky 1998, Trommer 2013 for critical discussion and proposed counterevidence).

I show that the evidence favoring the FBG is considerably richer than previously thought. Part of the new evidence comes from languages like Greek and Latin, which mostly affix to bound forms. These systems reveal a strikingly abrupt transition from completely non-cyclic phonology, in morphological domains where potential bases are bound forms, to across-the-board cyclicity in domains where bases are free-standing (in most cases of prefixation and in clitic groups). I show that the details of which processes apply cyclically on which domains are exactly as predicted by the FBG. Regarding the grammatical status of the FBG, a distinct class of cyclic effects (analyzed in greater detail on April 16-17) suggests that the FBG corresponds to a set of violable preferences. I propose a unified account of the cyclic processes that abide by the FBG and of those which appear to violate it.

"The cycle modified: theory and case studies"
Lectures on Latin and Romance

"The cycle without containment: Latin perfect stems"
Tuesday, April 16
2-3:30 pm
1229 Dwinelle Hall

"The cycle without containment in Romanian: Perfects and agentives"
Wednesday, April 17
2-3:30 pm
1229 Dwinelle Hall

Teaser (full abstracts here): In these two lectures, I present a class of almost-but-not-quite cyclic phenomena from Latin and Romance.

Acknowledgements: Prof. Steriade's visit is supported by the Department of Linguistics and the Diebold Fund for Indo-European Studies.