Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction, review

Jan 21, 23  Review: OT and stress – minimal violation, factorial typology and learning

Chapter 4 (up through 4.4; skip 4.5) of Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004) Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Blackwell.

Week 2: Segmental phonology in OT – examples from the phonology of voicing

Jan. 28. Pater, Joe. 2004. Austronesian nasal substitution and other NC effects. In John J. McCarthy (ed.),Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader, 271-89. Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

For further reading: Myers (1997: ms.) on gaps in the typology of NC effects and phonologization, and for later analysis of nasal substitution, Pater, Joe. 2001. Austronesian nasal substitution revisited. In L. Lombardi, (ed.) Segmental phonology in Optimality Theory: Constraints and Representations. Cambridge University Press. 159-182.

Jan. 30. Class canceled.

Week 3: Feature geometry and feature classes 

Feb. 4. Lombardi, Linda. 1999. Positional faithfulness and voicing assimilation in Optimality TheoryNatural Language and Linguistic Theory 17, 267-302.

Feb. 6. John J. McCarthy. 1988. Feature geometry and dependency: A reviewPhonetica 45 (1988): 84-108.

For further reading:

Padgett, Jaye. 2002. Feature classes in PhonologyLanguage 78. 81-110.

Odden (1991)

Week 4: Vowel harmony and Harmonic Serialism

Feb 11. McCarthy, John J. to appear. Autosegmental spreading in Optimality Theory. In John Goldsmith, Elizabeth Hume & Leo Wetzels (eds.), Tones and Features. Berlin and New York: Mouton deGruyter.

Feb. 13. Snow day.

Week 5-7: Student presentations

No class Feb. 18.

Feb. 20. Ivy – Constraints in phonological acquisition: The early stages (Hayes, 2004) (The link leads to a book that also contains the Gnanadesikan and Prince and Tesar papers on Markedness >> Faithfulness mentioned in class).

No class Feb. 25.

Feb. 27. Fiona – Phonological change in OT (Gess 2004).

March 4.

Week 7: Introduction to weighted constraints

March 6.  Pp. 77-104 of Potts, Pater, Jesney, Bhatt and Becker. 2010. Harmonic Grammar with linear programming: From linear systems to linguistic typologyPhonology 27. 77-117.

Week 8: Variation and MaxEnt-OT

March 11 & 13. Coetzee, Andries and Joe Pater. 2011. The place of variation in phonological theory. In John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan Yu (eds.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory (2nd ed.). Blackwell. 401-431.

SPRING BREAK: MARCH 18-20.

Week 9: Serial HG and its learning

March 25. Mullin, Kevin. 2011. Strength in Harmony Systems: Trigger and Directional Asymmetries. Ms, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

March 27. Pater, Joe. 2012. Serial Harmonic Grammar and Berber syllabification. In Toni Borowsky, Shigeto Kawahara, Takahito Shinya and Mariko Sugahara (eds.) Prosody Matters: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth O. Selkirk. London: Equinox Press. 43-72.

Staubs, Robert and Joe Pater. To appear. Learning serial constraint-based grammars. In John McCarthy and Joe Pater, eds. Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox Press.

Week 10: Intonation and syntax-phonology interface: overviews

April 1. Pierrehumbert, J. (2000) Tonal elements and their alignment, in M. Horne (ed) Prosody: Theory and Experiment. Studies Presented to Gosta Bruce. Kluwer, Dordrecht, 11-26.

April 3. Elordieta, Gorka (2008) An overview of theories of the syntax-phonology interface. Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology, 42, 209-286.

Further reading:

German, J., Pierrehumbert, J. and Kaufmann, S. (2006). Evidence for phonological constraints on nuclear accent placement, Language 82(1), 151-168.

Pierrehumbert, J. and J. Hirschberg (1990) The Meaning of Intonational contours in the Interpretation of Discourse, in P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. Pollack, (eds) .  Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. 271-311.

A link to a very basic intro to Praat and pitch (f0).

Week 11: Segmental domains and intonation, Tone.

April 8: Liaison and intonation.

Côté, Marie-Hélène. (2011). FrenchLiaison. In M. van Oostendorp, C. Ewen, E. Hume & K. Rice, eds. Companion to phonology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2685-2710.

Marjorie Pak and Michael Friesner (2006) French Phrasal Phonology in a Derivational Model of PF. NELS Proceedings.

April 10: Tone

Hyman, Larry (2011) The representation of tone. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phonology.

Pak, Marjorie. (2008). The postsyntactic derivation and its phonological reflexes. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Yip, Moira. (2002) Chapter 4 of Tone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Week 12-13: More learning

April 15 Structural bias in learning and typology

Moreton, Elliott and Joe Pater. 2012. Structure and substance in artificial-phonology learning. Part 1: StructurePart II: SubstanceLanguage and Linguistics Compass 6 (11): 686–701 and 702–718

Pater, Joe and Elliott Moreton. 2012. Structurally biased phonology: Complexity in learning and typology. In a special issue of the EFL Journal on phonology, edited by K.G. Vijayakrishnan (The Journal of the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad), 1-44.

April 17 Background on structural ambiguity.

Dresher, Elan. 1991. Cues and parameters in phonology. Proceedings of CLS.

Yang, Charles. 2002. A Variational Model of Language Acquisition. Ch. 2 of Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language.

April 22 MaxEnt learning of hidden structure in phonology and syntax

Johnson, Mark. 2013. Unsupervised estimation of globally-normalised local-feature grammars. MS, available from readings page.

Weeks 13-14. Student presentations.

April 24, 29. Student presentations.

Some other things we had hoped to get to

Phonetic grounding and phonological typology

Moreton, Elliott. 2008. Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology 25:83-127.

Flemming, Edward. 2001 Scalar and categorical phenomena in a unified model of phonetics and phonology. Phonology 18(1).

Further reading:

Hayes, Bruce, Kie Zuraw, Péter Siptár and Zsuzsa Londe. 2009. Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmonyLanguage 85: 822-863.

Moreton, Elliott and Joe Pater. 2012. Structure and substance in artificial-phonology learning. Part 1: StructurePart II: SubstanceLanguage and Linguistics Compass 6 (11): 686–701 and 702–718.

Pater, Joe. To appear. Canadian Raising with Language-Specific Weighted Constraints. Language.

Gradient phonotactics and constraint induction

Hayes, Bruce and Colin Wilson. A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning.  Linguistic Inquiry 39:379-440.

Match theory

Selkirk, Lisa. 2011. The Syntax-Phonology Interface, in J. Goldsmith, J. Riggle, and A. Yu, eds., The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Elfner, Emily. 2011. The interaction of linearization and prosody: Evidence from pronoun postposing in Irish. In Andrew Carnie (ed.) Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 17-40.

Further reading:

Bennett, Ryan Emily Elfner and Jim McCloskey. To appear. Lightest to the right: An apparently anomalous displacement in Irish. Linguistic Inquiry.