Last week, LEL hosted the 30th (sic!) edition of the Manchester Phonology Meeting, an annual conference that's made "phonology" and "Manchester" synonymous in the minds of hundreds of phonologists around the world. The conference first started in 1993 as the Manchester Workshop on Cognitive Phonology organised by Jacques Durand (then at Salford) and LEL's Nigel Vincent. It officially became the Manchester Phonology Meeting on its 6th edition in 1998 and it's been going strong ever since.
The statistics are undeniably impressive. Through the thirty years of conferencing, 1076 talks and 671 posters have been presented. 1076 talks would take the equivalent of 22.4 days to be heard in full, whereas 671 posters could cover the Deansgate Square South Tower from top to bottom (three posters wide). I hope we can all agree this is some serious amount of phonology content, and there still seems to be more phonology where it came from.
This years edition featured special session on "Is there a prosodic hierarchy, and if so, what does it consist of?" with invited talks from Jelena Krivokapic (University of Michigan), Violeta Martínez-Paricio (Universitat de València) and Heather Newell (Université du Québec à Montréal). The programme also included several contributions from Manchester phonologists past and present:
"Spanish /x/-fronting: gradient or categorical?" by Michael Ramsammy & George Sakr
"Prothetic consonants and abstract phonological structure in Scottish Gaelic" by Donald Morrison
"On the phonological representation of English diphthong vowels" by Patrycja Strycharczuk, Sam Kirkham, Emily Gorman & Takayuki Nagamine
"Intricate coda restrictions in loanwords of Tenyidie, an otherwise codaless language" by Yuni Kim & Savio Meyase
It is rumoured that conference highlights included an impromptu karaoke and a phonology-themed pub quiz. Only in Manchester!
No comments:
Post a Comment