Phonology is a core area of linguistic training. Working within the generative tradition, phonologists at USC pursue case studies and comparative research that contributes to developing formal models of mental representations of sound structures in language.

Faculty members with an active research focus in phonology are Ania Lubowicz and Rachel Walker. Additional faculty include Abigail Kaun (adjunct, Department of Linguistics, and associate dean of graduate programs at USC College), and Jean-Roger Vergnaud.

To make progress in phonological theory, it is essential to examine the nature of phonological representations and the relations that exist between them. Research at USC bears on these fundamental issues. One branch of research concerns relations between distinct levels of representation (lexicon and phonetic form) and between elements within the same level (within a phonetic form, and across words within the lexicon). Current projects investigate ways in which lexical contrasts are manifested in phonetic form and within a paradigm (Lubowicz) and examine how formal relations established between similar elements within a phonetic form mediate assimilation and dissimilation processes (Walker). Another branch of inquiry concerns structural well-formedness constraints, and their grounding in acoustic, articulatory, morphological, and psycholinguistic factors. Work in this direction includes studies of the role of phonetically-grounded scales and position-sensitive effects (Walker), the relation between formal properties and perception / production in long-distance versus local phenomena (Walker), and the effects of morphological boundaries on similarity avoidance (Lubowicz). In addition, a collaborative project by Toby Mintz and Rachel Walker investigates the role of vowel assimilation in facilitating language acquisition. Languages and language families that form the concentration of phonological research by USC faculty include Altaic, Arabic, Amazonian, Benue-Congo, and Slavic.

Phonology is a formal system that intersects with other dimensions of formal linguistic structure, including morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as cognitive and computational areas. The phonology-morphology interface, in particular, is one area of focus at USC. A pivotal area of investigation involves integrating the phonological and morphological components by means of parallel evaluative metrics. Current work centers on phonology-morphology mappings and their consequences for the model of cross-structure indexing and evaluation (Walker), and the investigation into opaque allomorphy (Lubowicz). Another aspect of this work involves modeling the interaction between phonological processes and morphological structure in parallel through local constraint conjunction (Lubowicz).

The phonology community at USC is active in promoting dialogue on each other's research and in developing students' academic and professional skills. The USC Phon Lunch provides a forum for intellectual exchange on topics in phonology and phonetics, and the USC Phonetics Laboratory provides a common space for meetings, experiments, and computing facilities. Recent graduate student presentations at refereed conferences include NELS, WCCFL, CLS, LSA, WECOL, BUCLD, and LSRL, among others.

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