A thought about academic jobs

I try not to pontificate about the academic job market. I recognize that I incredibly fortunate to have the job I have. I recognize that it is hard to get such a job, that it in some sense it comes down to luck, that there are more PhDs than faculty jobs, and finally that my job is not my friend. That said…

A colleague of mine had a PhD advisee who was offered a more or less ideal tenure-track job, at an excellent state school specializing in the advisee’s subarea, in a very pleasant town. The student, believe it or not, turned it down, and is now starting more or less from scratch on the alt-ac path. I genuinely don’t understand this. Earning a PhD in your field is the one always-necessary condition for getting an faculty job, even if the skills transfer to other pursuits. The demands of a graduate program expects from you are, to a great degree, necessary to get a faculty job. There are of course extra steps—that qualifying paper has to be sent off to a journal, and so on—but in terms of effort they are nothing compared to the work needed to get your degree. If you are doing well in your PhD program and if you are enjoying your studies, why not, for as long as you are able, consider applying for faculty positions? If you are not meeting your program’s expectations, your pessimism about the academic job market is besides the point, and if you are meeting or exceeding those expectations, you really might want to consider it.

Underspecification in Barrow Inupiaq

Dresher (2009:§7.2.1) discusses an interesting morphophonological puzzle from the Inuit (Canadian) and Inupiaq (Alaskan) dialects of Eskimo-Aleut. These dialects descend from a four-phoneme vowel system *i, *u, *ə, *a, but in most dialects *ə has merged into *i, yielding three surface vowels: [i, a, u]. However, in some dialects (including Barrow Inupiaq), there appears to be a covert contrast between two “flavors” of i: “strong i” triggers palatalization of a following coronal consonant whereas “weak i” does not.

(1) Barrow Inupiaq (Kaplan 1981:§3.22, his 27-29):

a. iglu ‘house’, iglulu ‘and a house’, iglunik ‘houses’
b. ini ‘place’, inilu ‘and a place’, ‘ininik’ places’
c. iki ‘wound’, ikiʎu ‘and a wound’, ikiɲik ‘wounds’

Presumably, the stem-final i in (1b) is weak and the one in (1c) is strong.

Following some prior work, Dresher supposes that there is an underlying contrast between weak and strong i. He posits the following featural specification:¹

(2) Features for Barrow Inupiaq vowels (to be revised):

strong i: [Coronal, -Low]
weak i: [-Low]
/u/: [Labial, -Low]
/a/: [+Low]

This analysis has a close relationship to the theory of underspecification used in Logical Substance-Free Phonology (henceforth, LP); I assume familiarity with the assumptions and operations of that theory, which have been discussed at length by Reiss and colleagues (Bale et al. 2020, Reiss 2021), including in an introductory textbook (Bale & Reiss 2018). Just a few modifications are needed, however.

For Dresher, who hypothesizes that non-contrastive features (computed using an algorithm he describes in detail; op. cit.:16) are the only ones which are phonologically active, it is not clear why strong i palatalizes coronal segments: clearly it is not that they are spreading the privative [Coronal], since that certainly would not trigger palatalization! One could, of course, adopt an analysis in which palatalization is not assimilatory. Alternatively, we could identify another feature specification which is characteristic of i and which might trigger palatalization of coronal consonants. Let us suppose this is in fact just [Palatal].² This gives us the following minimally-modified feature specification:

(2) Features for Barrow Inupiaq vowels (revised):

strong i: [Palatal, -Low]
weak i: [-Low]
/u/: [Labial, -Low]
/a/: [+Low]

According to Kaplan (§1.2), there are both plain and palatal coronal phonemes, so this seems to be a feature-changing process. Following the assumptions of LP that feature-changing processes derive from a deletion rule followed by an insertion rule, two rules are needed here; we give these below.

(3) [+Consonantal] \ {Coronal} / [Palatal] __
(4) [+Consonantal] ⊔ {Palatal} / [Palatal] __

Crucially, vowels other than strong i lack the [Palatal] specification to trigger (3-4).

Endnotes

Dresher’s analysis assumes privative features, but he notes elsewhere in the book that he usually adopts the features of his sources unless there is some relevant reason to dispute them.
If preferred, it is easy to translate the proposed analysis into one in which palatals are [-Back] and plain coronals are [+Back], à la Padgett (2003).

References

Bale, A., Papillon, M., and Reiss, C. 2014. Targeting underspecified segments: a formal analysis of feature-changing and feature-filling rules. Lingua 148: 240-253.
Bale, A., and Reiss, C. 2018. Phonology: a Formal Introduction. MIT Press.
Dresher, B. E. 2009. The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology. Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, L. D. 1981. Phonological issues in North Alaskan Inupiaq. Alaska Native Language Center.
Padgett, J. 2003. Contrast and post-velar fronting in Russian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21: 39-87.
Reiss, C. 2021. Towards a complete Logical Phonology model of intrasegmental changes. Glossa 6:107.

The phenomenology of assimilation

[This is adapted from part of paper I’m working on with Charles Reiss.]

Assimilation is a key notion for many phonological theories, and there are even intimations of it in the Prague School. Hyman provides an early formalization: he defines it as the insertion of a feature specification αF on a segment immediately adjacent to another segment specified αF.

(1) Assimilation schemata (after Hyman 1975: 159):
X → {αF} / __ [αF]
X → {αF} / [αF] __

In autosegmental phonology, assimilation is instead conceptualized as the sharing (rather than the “copying”) of feature specification via the insertion of association lines and phonological tiers provide a more general notion of adjacent, but the basic notion remains the same.

Substance-free phonology (SFP) also makes use of these “Greek letter” coefficients to express segmental identity (or non-identity) between features on various segments. What SFP denies is that there is any need to recognize or formalize notions like assimilation (or dissimilation) in the first place, because SFP rejects the notion of formal markedness. Yes, there are rules that cause an obstruent to agree in voicing with an obstruent to its immediate right, or which delete a glide between identical vowels, or which raise mid vowels before high vowels, and SFP can easily express such rules. However, there are also rules which raise mid vowels before low vowels, before nasals, or before a word boundary. The following principle expresses this position in general terms:

(2) Substance-freeness of structural change: featural specifications changed by rule application need not be present in the rule’s structural environment.

This principle is a claim that proposed phonological rules need not “make sense” in featural terms. It holds that the whatness of a rule, what feature is being added to a segment, is logically independent of the whereness, the triggering environment. This in turn echos Chomsky & Halle’s (1968:428) claim that “the phonological component requires wide latitude in the freedom to change features.” Note that principle (2) is not itself an axiom of SFP, but rather something which is not part of the theory.

References

Chomsky, N. and Halle, M. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row.
Hyman, L. M. 1975. Phonology: Theory and Analysis. Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.

High school as signaling behavior

When you meet an adult for the first time in Cincinnati—where I grew up—it is customary to ask them where they went to high school. Even though I have had basically nothing to do with Cincinnati since I reached the age of majority, I can learn so much about someone by learning they went to St. Ursula, or Walnut Hills, or Elder, Summit Country Day, or Wyoming. (This is helped along by the fact that Cincinnati is, for historical reasons, rather Catholic.) It’s one of the first things I ask born and raised New Yorkers too, and it tends to yield a lot of information. I know half a dozen graduates of Bronx Science (including the president of my college); I believe David Pesetsky is one of several well-known linguists who attend Horace Mann; Hunter High is also a very promising sign, as is Stuyvesant. I even know about some of the elite high schools of Illinois at this point.

While virtually all the focus on “elite institutions” is directed at undergraduate colleges, I think this is something of a misdirection. While this may seem self-serving, I think high school choice might be a stronger signal than college choice, at least in parts of the country where it is common for one (with the help and possibly financial support of one’s parents, of course) to more or less pick a high school, with many magnet and private options.

My personal experience bears this out. I went to a very good suburban public school system (Lakota) until I was 14 and the strongest students at 14 who continued on to high school in that system are not living particularly impressive lives. In contrast, my class at my very good Catholic high school (St. Xavier) includes, among other impressive individuals, two centimillionaires (though one of those two is a phony and a scoundrel). I for one did not gain much personal ambition from St. Xavier, but I did acquire a love of learning (as someone once described it to me, “a pseudo-erotic attachment to knowledge”). Also, without any particular intentionality, I attended a good (but not selective) “R1” public college, and I feel like high school left me particularly well-positioned to take advantage of it. I didn’t even seriously consider elite colleges; I grew up in a solidly middle class family where there was no particular knowledge of elite institutions, to the point that I didn’t even find out what the Ivy League was until after I’d been accepted to Penn for my PhD. Had I been drawn from a slightly higher class stratum, I might have applied to Ivys, or at least one of those pricy private liberal arts schools on the East Coast like Vassar, and had I done so, I would have taken on an onerous load of personal debt in the process. And for what? It wouldn’t have made me any better a scholar.