Course Description

This installment of advanced phonology focuses on the following question: what is the proper model of constraint interaction in phonology? The notion of additive effect will emerge as crucial for answering this question. Both categorical and probabilistic constraint-based phonology will be discussed. The classical implementations of Optimality Theory, Harmonic Grammar, Maximum Entropy Grammars, and Noisy Harmonic Grammar will be introduced, characterized, and compared in terms of the additive effects they allow for.

Area Tags: Phonology, Computational Linguistics, Typology, Variation, Linguistic Frameworks

(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30am – 11:50pm

Location: ILC N400

Instructor: Giorgio Magri

Giorgio Magri studied philosophy and mathermatics at the University of Milano before completing his PhD in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. Since 2012, Magri is a permanent researcher at the French CNRS, based in Paris. Magri is currently on leave as a visiting scholar at MIT where he is teaching a seminar on models of probabilistic phonology. Magri has worked on semantics and then on learnability in constraint-based phonology. Recently, his interests in phonology have extened to typological analysis of probabilistic sound patterns and he works on constraint-based models of probablilistic phonology.