Adamantios I. Gafos

Linguistics

Phonology

Go to my homepage in Linguistics.

Adamantios I. Gafos, Associate Professor; Ph.D. 1996, Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University; B.Sc. 1990, Computer Science, University of Patras, Greece.

My research focuses primarily on phonology, as a subfield of cognitive science, and specifically on the nature of phonological representations. Questions in phonetics-phonology, phonology-morphology addressed recently include:

• Is the temporal dimension of linguistic form implementational, 'low-level mechanics' of speech articulation or is it deeply grammatical? What are cognitively and biologically plausible ways of threading a notion of time in the representations? (A Grammar of Gestural Coordination)

• What is the proper way to characterize non-concatenative morphology and phonology? Do languages with non-concatenative morphology require special phonological representations? (On the Proper Characterization of Non-Concatenative Languages, Eliminating Long Distance Consonantal Spreading, The Initial State and Verbal Stems in Classical Arabic)

• Are there constraints on phonological assimilations grounded in the articulatory system? (The Articulatory Basis of Locality in Phonology) Recent work on this topic uses the electromagnetometer and ultrasound systems at Haskins Laboratories to study the articulatory correlates of vowel harmony (supported by NIH).

• Description and analysis of the phonology and morphology of Modern Greek dialects, in collaboration with Angeliki Ralli, at the University of Patras, Greece. Work has focused on two dialectal varieties of Lesvos. (Morphosyntactic Features and Paradigmatic Uniformity in two Dialects of Lesvos)

Email: ag63@nyu.edu

Selected publications (sorted by area) Click on the title to download in .pdf format

Phonetics/ Phonology

(under review) "Dynamics: the non-derivational alternative to modeling phonetics-phonology" [uses SIL fonts]

In press. "On neutral vowels in Hungarian". International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. (Barcelona, Spain). 2003. [with Stefan Benus]

2002, A Grammar of Gestural Coordination, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 20 (2), pp. 269-337.

1999 The Articulatory Basis of Locality in Phonology. Garland Publishers, New York. (272 pp.)

1999 Consonant Transparency and Vowel Echo. In P. Tamanji, M. Hirotani, and N. Hall (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistics Society, pp. 81 - 96, GLSA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. (with Linda Lombardi, University of Maryland at College Park, MD)

1998 Eliminating Long Distance Consonantal Spreading, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16:2, pp. 223-278. An earlier version is 1995, "On the Proper Characterization of Non-Concatenative Languages," Ms., 60pp. (Baltimore, MD: Dept. of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins).

1997 A Cross-Sectional View of [s], [sh], and [th]. In K. Kusumoto (ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistics Society, pp. 127-141, GLSA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.

Morphology/ Phonology

To appear, The Initial State and Verbal Stems in Classical Arabic, ms. 72 pp., Language

2001, Morphosyntactic Features and Paradigmatic Uniformity in two Dialects of Lesvos, Journal of Greek Linguistics 2, pp. 41-73 (with Angeliki Ralli)

1998 A-Templatic Reduplication, Linguistic Inquiry 29, pp. 515-527.

1992 Against a Contextual Definition of Head in Morphology: Evidence from Modern Greek Compounds, In A. Kathol and J. Beckman (eds.) MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 16, Papers from the Fourth Student Conference in Linguistics, pp. 41-56.

Learnability/ Computational

2002, Training Spaces and Generalization: Evidence from Hebrew word-formation, Cognition, 83 (2), pp. 113-139. (with Iris Berent, Gary Marcus, and Joseph Shimron)

1994 Phonotactics and the Lexicon: Beyond Bootstrapping, In Eva Clark (ed.), Proceedings of the 1994 Stanford Child Language Research Forum, pp. 11-21, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (with Michael Brent)