Ninth International Phonology Meeting

Structure and Melody

1-3 November 2002, Vienna

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Workshop on Templates

organised by Jean Lowenstamm and Tobias Scheer

Templates Templates - as originally introduced in McCarthy (1979)'s insightful autosegmental formalization of a traditional tool of Semitic grammar - have had a short and intriguing history. In retrospect, it appears that the most burning, indeed pivotal, question raised by McCarthy's proposal can be stated as follows: can UG plausibly countenance as radically different types of morphophonological competence as are evidenced by languages generously tapping the resources of non-concatenative morphology (e.g. Classical Arabic), and languages that do not appear to evidence templatic activity? Twenty years after McCarthy's findings, it appears that two families of research programmes have emerged in reasonably clear fashion. Some have argued that the classical phenomena initially justifying root-and-template descriptions, could be brought into the fold of more general accounts. By contrast, others argue that templatic activity, far from being a typological feature, is pervasive, indeed universal.

All those interested in assessing the status of templates are welcome to submit a brief abstract for a 20 min. presentation.

Contact email address: Tobias Scheer

Fee

Since the workshop is an integral part of the main meeting, there is no extra fee for the workshop, but workshop participants must pay the fee for the main meeting (EUR 50, students 25).