The Identity Thesis for Language and Music (w/ David Pesetsky): In this paper, we argue that all differences between language and music are a consequence of differences in their building blocks: arbitrary pairings of sound and meaning for language; combinations of pitch classes for music. In all other respects, the two systems are formally identical. The arguments involve syntax, prosody, the syntax-prosody interface, and head movement. We argue that all of these have formal analogs in music.
Contrastive Focus vs. Discourse-New: Evidence from Prosodic Prominence in English (w/ Lisa Selkirk): This paper presents evidence from an English elicitation experiment that speakers distinguish between contrastive focus and material that is merely discourse-new. We argue that the distinction is best analyzed in terms of prosodic prominence, reducing the phonetic difference to independent facts about the grammar and generating a range of predictions about how contrastive focus may be realized cross-linguistically.
'Compensatory Shortening' and Phonetic Representations in English : My phonetics generals paper, defended September 2007. An experimental investigation of vowel duration in English finds that, in certain cases, adding more consonants to a syllable reduces the duration of the syllable nucleus. Two approaches to modeling the data are outlined, one using only articulatory targets, and one using auditory targets instead of or in addition to articulatory ones. I argue that the data can only be accounted for if auditory targets play a role in the grammar.
Romance and Restriction : A draft of my in-progress syntax-semantics generals paper. I re-examine the alleged restrictive/non-restrictive adjective alternation in Spanish and Italian. The central empirical finding is that the alleged post-nominal ambiguity in these languages is not an ambiguity at all, but the result of a conversational implicature that can be cancelled. A general account of restrictivity in terms of conversational maxims is introduced. Pre-nominal adjectives are somewhat more mysterious; I discuss their interpretation at length, but the issue is left somewhat open.
Russian Consonant Cvljusters : An informal, flawed, but kind of interesting 1st-year phonology squib. It examines a small subset of yer alternations in Russian, which can be characterized phonotactically.
Optimal Musical Grouping : A paper I presented at the conference on Music and Language as Cognitive Systems in Cambridge, UK, May 2007. This paper sketches an Optimality Theoretic approach to Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1983) musical grouping system. I argue that OT allows an elegant and parsimonious account of how grouping principles interact. Inviolable principles of structure-building are argued to be cognitive universals, and are encoded in GEN, the locus of universal invariance.
