The Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm) has just celebrated its silver anniversary. In its 25 years of history, mfm has become the largest phonology conference in the world, regulary attracting participants from all over the world. The silver jubilee festivities included a wine reception at Hulme Hall, during which Koen Sebregts gave a fun- and fact-packed presentation under the title “Twenty-five years of the mfm, twenty-five years of phonology“. Koen treated his audience to some astonishing statistics: notably, the talks given at mfm so far have lasted 433 hours in total, which is the time that it would take you to walk from Hulme Hall to the North Sea coast, take the ferry to the Netherlands, visit Koen in Utrecht, and then walk on all the way to Rome!
Of course, mfm could not be the success that it is without the generous collaboration of many phonologists around the world. Chief among them is the mfm convenor and main organizer, Patrick Honeybone, and the many scholars who serve on the mfm advisory board. This year, Patrick was ably assisted in Manchester by colleague Patrycja Strycharczuk, PhD students Stefano Coretta and Stephen Nichols, and MA student Jane Scanlon, and in Edinburgh by Jade Sanstead.
The academic programme of 25mfm included a special session on “Typology and phonological theory“, featuring Birgit Alber and Mark Donohue as invited speakers, and former colleague Yuni Kim alongside Adam Albright, Marc van Oostendorp, and Tobias Scheer as discussants.
Manchester’s own postgrad phonologists were also very well represented on the programme, with a talk by Donald Morrison on “Vowel nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic: the search for phonetic paradigm uniformity effects”, and the following posters:
- George Bailey, “Synchronic evidence for diachronic pathways of change: /g/-deletion and the life cycle of phonological processes”
- Fernanda Barrientos & Deepthi Gopal, “Perceptual boundaries and features in Chilean Spanish”
- Stefano Coretta, “Towards an articulatory based typology of laryngeal effects on vowel duration”
- Stephen Nichols, “Nasal spreading and syllabification in Kamaiurá”
Manchet 
Posted on June 6, 2017 by manling