Past Event: Monday Colloquium: The Dynamical Emergence of Discreteness in Phonology (Khalil Iskarous; University of Southern California)

Talk Abstract: Dynamical Systems Analysis (DSA), a field at the heart of Mathematical Physics and Biology, studies the quantitative variation in the states of natural systems, but it also studies qualitative differences in the behaviors of such systems. For the past 50 years, there have been several efforts to study linguistic systems from the point of view of dynamical systems theory, but a great deal of that work has over-emphasized DSA’s ability to predict quantitative variation, and not enough of it has emphasized DSA’s ability to predict and describe qualitative differences. In this talk I will illustrate how several qualitative aspects of a phonological system can be explained based on DSA. The empirical domain investigated is the pitch accent system of American English, through joint work with Jennifer Cole and Jeremy Steffman. It will be shown that a DSA account is capable not only of accounting for quantitative differences in F0 trajectory amongst the pitch accents, but that it is also able to predict the dimensions of qualitative contrast in the system. The talk will begin with a short intuitive introduction to dynamical systems, and will end by a short introduction to how the dynamical approach is being currently extended to the description of syntactic structure.