Research
My main research — virtually all in collaboration with colleagues and students — aims to find new solutions to classic problems in the study of sound systems and how they change. We draw data especially from the Germanic languages, including contemporary American English. I also work on problems of language contact and shift, and phonological and diachronic issues in some Native American languages.
I'm happy to share unpublished work, especially in exchange for comments and suggestions. Of course, most recent journal papers are available electronically through research libraries. For a copy of the infamous 1990 Macaulay & Salmons paper, "Offensive Rock Band Names: A linguistic taxonomy", click here.
Manuscripts, under review or in preparation
The History of German: What the past reveals about today's language. (In draft.)
Tom Purnell, Eric Raimy & Joseph Salmons. Abstract phonology and hypermodularity.
Gregory K. Iverson & Joseph Salmons. Final Devoicing. Companion to Phonology, ed. by Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Beth Hume & Keren Rice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ryan Carroll, Ragnar Svare, Joseph Salmons. Not so fast there: Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs.
Ewa Jacewicz, Joseph Salmons, Robert Fox. A dynamic approach to back vowel fronting.
Andy Wedel, Joseph Salmons, Mark Louden. Rapid borrowing in basic and frequent vocabulary.
Segmental phonological change. A Companion to Historical Linguistics, ed. by Vit Bubenik & Silvia Luraghi. London & New York: Continuum.
What immigrant letters can tell us about English in German-American communities.
Laura Catharine Smith, Joseph Salmons & David Holsinger. The mediation of perceptual cues: Evidence from cluster reduction.
Monica Macaulay & Joseph Salmons. Nonconcatenative Morphology in Algonquian.
Forthcoming papers
The evolution of Germanic. Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An international handbook of language comparison and the reconstruction of Indo-European, ed. Matthias Fritz & Jared S. Klein.Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Joseph Salmons & Thomas Purnell. Language contact and the development of American English. The Handbook of Language Contact, ed. by Raymond Hickey. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ewa Jacewicz, Robert Allen Fox, Joseph Salmons. Articulation rate across dialect, gender and age. Language Variation & Change.
Kathryn Remlinger, Joseph Salmons & Luanne von Schneidemesser. Revised Perceptions: Changing dialect awareness in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. American Speech (Special issue on Enregistration.)
Thomas Purnell & Joseph Salmons. Coherence over time and space in sound change. Memorial Volume for Sergei Starostin, ed. by Vitaly Shevoroshkin et al.
Ewa Jacewicz, Joseph Salmons & Robert Fox. Prosodic conditioning, vowel dynamics and sound change. Variation in Phonetics and Phonology, ed. by Caroline Féry, Jörg Mayer, Frank Kügler & Ruben van de Vijver. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gregory K. Iverson & Joseph C. Salmons. “Naturalness and the Lifecycle of Language Change.” On Inflection: In Memory of Wolfgang U. Wurzel, ed. by Andreas Bittner, Frans Plank & Patrick Steinkrüger. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gregory K. Iverson & Joseph C. Salmons. “Copying, Blurring and the Morphological Roles of Germanic Umlaut.” Festschrift for [anon.]. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.