Title：“When Experimental Results go beyond Corpus Trend Extrapolation: Russian Homophony Avodiace”
Speaker：Dr. Andrei Munteanu (McGill University, Canada)
Time：6/10(Tue.) 10:00 – 12:00
Place：人社二館207教室

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming talk of the NYCU Phon Brown Bag Series:

6/10 10:00am-12:00pm  Dr. Andrei Munteanu (McGill University, Canada)
“When Experimental Results go beyond Corpus Trend Extrapolation: Russian Homophony Avodiace”
Registration link: https://forms.gle/SapUbUS5kH75T4e5AAbstract: I argue for the importance of experimental evidence in phonology through a case study of homophony avoidance in Russian nominals. Corpus data shows that, while the genitive singular morpheme /-a/ is potentially homophonous with one of the nominative plural allomorphs /-a/, little to no homophony is found in the language. Potentially homophonous pairs of genitive singular and nominative plural forms differ in either stress assignment or in the stem (suppletion). A subsequent nonce word production task shows that speakers strongly prefer non-homophonous combinations of genitive singular and nominative plural, even going beyond the patterns observed in the corpus. As such, while a homophony avoidance effect is implied in the corpus data, it is the experimental results that directly evidence homophony avoidance in the synchronic grammar.
We look forward to your participation!