Research interests
Jennifer L. Smith
My research in phonology -- the study of sound-structure systems in human language -- is largely organized around the following questions:
- Current research strongly supports a model of the phonological grammar that includes a set of violable constraints, prioritized differently in different languages. What are these constraints like?
- What elements of linguistic representation do constraints refer to?
- Can phonological constraints (or their ranking) refer to, or be restricted by, information from other components of the grammar? What is the role of factors such as phonetic naturalness, morphosyntactic word class, syntactic/semantic structure, or sociocultural effects?
I address these general questions through projects on more specific topics, such as Fukuoka Japanese intonation, positional effects in phonology (including lexical category effects/"noun faithfulness"), sonority and syllable structure, and loanword phonology.
Other themes that appear in my research are the phonology of Japanese and of other East Asian languages, and phonology and reading.
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Fukuoka Japanese intonation
The intonational phonology of WH questions in Fukuoka Japanese shows interesting patterns that bear on current debates about the nature of the phonology-syntax interface.
Positional effects in phonology
Sometimes, a markedness or faithfulness constraint is enforced only in a subset of the forms of a language. Such positional or domain-specific effects have implications for our understanding of phonology and its interfaces.
One line of work in this area is concerned with positional augmentation, markedness requirements that are imposed exclusively on phonologically prominent or "strong" positions. I argue that positional augmentation always involves perceptually salient properties, so it is relevant for our understanding of the relationship between formal and functional factors in shaping the constraint set.
I am also interested in various aspects of positional faithfulness, one approach to the ability of strong positions to resist processes of neutralization that affect other positions. (The work on noun faithfulness described below also falls into this category, since I argue that nouns behave like phonologically strong positions.)
Noun faithfulness (and other lexical category effects in phonology)
While the morphosyntactic differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives have long been important in linguistic theory, there are also intriguing differences in the phonological behavior of words of different lexical categories. In many cases, nouns appear to show positional faithfulness effects, maintaining phonological contrasts that are not permitted in verbs. This topic is part of the more general research area of positional effects, discussed above.
Sonority and syllable structure
The search for a phonetically motivated account of why onset glides are subject to different sonority restrictions in different languages has implications for the formal representation of syllable-internal structure and the constraints Onset and *Onset/X.
Loanword phonology
Loanword adaptation -- the phonological alterations that words may undergo when they are borrowed -- is another area where the relationship between formal and functional factors can be explored. Both phonetic and sociocultural factors may influence phonological patterns.
The phonology of Japanese and other East Asian languages
I am interested in various aspects of Japanese phonology. In addition to my work on Fukuoka Japanese intonation, several of the papers on loanword phonology and noun faithfulness focus on data from Japanese.
In addition to Japanese, I have also worked on phonological phenomena in Chinese languages and Korean.
Phonology and reading
A joint research project with Gary Feng and Elliott Moreton, looking at phonological factors in reading, reading acquisition, and reading difficulties.