Mike Opper will present his research in Phondi today. The title and abstract of his presentation are given below.

"Segmental Contrast in Bái"
My dissertation is titled Phonological Contrast in Bái and focuses on three aspects of synchronic Bái phonology: the phonemic status of the pre-nuclear glides, variation in the nine vowel categories across dialects, and the ongoing contrast reduction in the tone system. In this talk I focus on the first two aspects which I argue are closely interrelated. The motivation behind this work is to interpret prior descriptions as continuum of the possible phonemic variation found across dialects of the same language. Although these prior descriptions are typically impressionistic and devoid of phonological architecture, I show that Bái phonemics is best understood with reference to syllable structure in a model much like Yi & Duanmu 2015 for Lanzhou Chinese. This approach assumes fewer phonemes than all previous descriptions, accounts for generalizations across several morpho-phonological processes that were not properly addressed in earlier work, and explains why certain syllables do not occur. Additionally, I present two innovative patterns in the vowel systems of certain dialects of Southern Bái with acoustic measurements. The implications of these patterns are discussed in relation to Labov 1994.