{"id":18010,"date":"2026-05-04T06:04:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T10:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=18010"},"modified":"2026-05-04T06:04:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T10:04:00","slug":"phonology-circle-christopher-bader-mit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/05\/04\/phonology-circle-christopher-bader-mit-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonology Circle  - Christopher Bader (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong> Christopher Bader (MIT)<br class=\"\"><strong>Title: <\/strong>Front Vowels are Palatal: Phonetic and Phonological Evidence<br class=\"\"><strong>Time: <\/strong>, 5pm - 6:30pm<br class=\"\"><strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D831<br class=\"\"><br class=\"\"><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>Clements (1991) and Hume (1992) proposed that front vowels are coronal, rather than<br clear='none'\/>\ndorsal (Sagey 1986). But this is the wrong generalization, since it fails to explain the following<br clear='none'\/>\ncontrast in Mandarin Chinese: *si, *?i, ?i \u0091west\u0092 (?) (Lee-Kim 2014). As this example shows,<br clear='none'\/>\nthe Mandarin high front vowel \/i\/ may only be preceded by a palatal ([-anterior][+distributed])<br clear='none'\/>\nsibilant. Anterior and retroflex sibilants, which of course are also coronal, may not precede this<br clear='none'\/>\nvowel. Instead of si and ?i, Mandarin has these consonants followed by the syllabic, non-vocalic<br clear='none'\/>\ncoronal sonorants [? ? ] and [? ? ], sometimes incorrectly referred to as \u0091apical vowels\u0092. As I will<br clear='none'\/>\nshow, neither anterior nor retroflex consonants pattern with front vowels. But fortition of front<br clear='none'\/>\nvowels can result in palatal consonants and front vowels do pattern with palatal consonants. I<br clear='none'\/>\nwill argue that this is because front vowels are palatal. The Mandarin data cited is then the result<br clear='none'\/>\nof AGREE(PAL), AGREE(ANT), and AGREE(RET) being higher ranked than IDENT(Amax), a<br clear='none'\/>\nconstraint which preserves vocalic apertures&#8230; (continued in attached file)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Christopher Bader (MIT)Title: Front Vowels are Palatal: Phonetic and Phonological EvidenceTime: , 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Clements (1991) and Hume (1992) proposed that front vowels are coronal, rather than dorsal (Sagey 1986). But this is the wrong generalization, since it fails to explain the following contrast in Mandarin Chinese: *si, *?i, ?i \u0091west\u0092 (?) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}