Week 1 (Sept. 4-6)
Introduction to generative phonology, OT, and stress: analysis and typology of single stress languages
Handout:
9/4 An introduction to stress in phonological theory
Required readings
Chapter 1 of John McCarthy. 2008. Doing Optimality Theory: Applying Theory to Data. Blackwell.
Further readings
Chapter 4 of Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky. 1993/2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Blackwell.
Walker, Rachel. 1997. Mongolian Stress, Licensing, and Factorial Typology. MS, USC.
Gordon, Matthew. 2002. A factorial typology of quantity insensitive stress. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 20, 491-552.
Hayes, Bruce. 1995. Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies. University of Chicago Press. (on Kelkar’s Hindi see pp. 276-278).
Week 2 (Sept. 11-13)
Minimally violable vs. inviolable constraints, factorial typology, contrast and faithfulness
Handouts
9/13 Faithfulness and factorial typology
Required reading
McCarthy (2008) Ch. 2. (first half)
Further reading
On triggering and blocking: Section 2 of McCarthy, John J., Joe Pater, and Kathryn Pruitt. To appear. Cross-level interactions in Harmonic Serialism. In John McCarthy and Joe Pater, eds. Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox Press.
On basic syllable structure typology: Chapter 6 of Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky. 1993/2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Blackwell.
On CV.CV syllabification and violability: Intro to 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.
One argument for an explicit Gen: Kartunnen, Lauri. 2006. The Insufficiency of Paper-and-Pencil Linguistics: the Case of Finnish Prosody. In Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King (eds), pp. 287-300, CSLI Publications, Stanford, California.
On syllable contact (seen in homework 2): Gouskova, Maria. 2004. Relational hierarchies in OT: the case of Syllable Contact. Phonology 21:2, pp. 201-250.
Weeks 3-6 (Sept. 18, 25-27, Oct. 2-4, 11)
Parameters and constraints in the analysis of alternating stress
Learning in OT, comparison with parametric theory
Hidden structure learning: prosodic structure and underlying representations
Handouts
9/25 Parametric iterative stress
10/2 Alternating stress – clash and lapse
Click to download OT-Help files as .zip – 5-syllable stress window (class discussion) and 5-syllable iterative stress (homework)
Required readings
Dresher, Elan. 1991. Cues and parameters in phonology. Proceedings of CLS.
McCarthy (2008) Ch. 2 (second half)
Further readings
Akers, Crystal. 2012. Commitment-Based Learning of Hidden Linguistic Structures. Doctoral Dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. 446 pages.
Dresher, B. E. & Kaye, J. D. 1990. A Computational Learning Model for Metrical Phonology. Cognition 34: 137-195.
Kager, René. 2005. Rhythmic Licensing Theory: An extended typology. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Phonology, 5-31. Seoul: The Phonology-Morphology Circle of Korea.
Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (2012) Disambiguating Syntactic Triggers. Language Acquisition 19.
Hayes book listed above.
Week 7 (Oct. 16-18)
Derivations: Opacity, level ordering and cyclicity
Handouts
10/18 Level ordering and cyclicity
Required reading
John J. McCarthy. 2007. “Derivations and levels of representation”. The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology. Ed. Paul de Lacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further readings
More on Axininca: John J. McCarthy and Alan Prince. 1993. Prosodic Morphology I: Constraint Interaction and Satisfaction. Technical Report #3, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, 1993.
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (2011). Cyclicity. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds). The Blackwell companion to phonology, vol. 4, 2019-2048. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Week 8 (Oct. 23-25)
Harmonic serialism
Handouts
10/23 Locality and harmonic serialism
See the OT-Help web page for the serial manual and associated example files, and McCarthy’s nasal harmony example.
Click here for a .zip folder with files for that illustrate a problem for Share discovered by Kevin Mullin and Colin Wilson.
Further readings
On the nasal harmony case and on general issues for the analysis of autosegmental spreading in OT: John J. McCarthy. “Autosegmental spreading in Optimality Theory” Tones and Features (Clements memorial volume). Ed. John Goldsmith, Elizabeth Hume, and Leo Wetzels. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011.
10/28 603-homework-5
Click here for a .zip folder with OT-Help input files.
Weeks 9,10 (Oct. 30-Nov.6)
Harmonic Grammar, analysis of variation
Required readings
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.
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.
Handouts
Berber-example (.mp3 file) More Berber recordings from John Coleman
11/1 HG vs. OT with Local Constraint Conjunction
11/1 MaxEnt grammar and variation
Software files for 11/1 (.zip folder); Robert Staubs’ R “Solver” script
11/6 Why variation must be in the phonology
Kiparsky’s 1993/1994 analysis of t/d-deletion
Software files for our “Will” analysis
11/6 Homework 6 (note to future readers – this homework did not work very well – see the last day below for my own write-up)
Anttila’s 1995 Finnish analysis, Boersma and Hayes 2001, Goldwater and Johnson 2003
Software files for Homework 6 (.zip folder)
R script to make weighted tableaux for “Solver” (copy and paste into existing scripts)
Further reading
Nevins, Andrew. 2011. Phonologically conditioned allomorph selection. Chapter from the Companion to Phonology.
Pater, Joe. To appear. Universal Grammar with Weighted Constraints. In John McCarthy and Joe Pater, eds. Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox Press.
Pater, Joe, Robert Staubs, Karen Jesney and Brian Smith. 2012. Learning probabilities over underlying representations. In the Proceedings of the Twelfth Meeting of the ACL-SIGMORPHON: Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology. 62-71.
Weeks 10-11 (Nov. 8, 13, 15)
Phonetic naturalness, features and correspondence theory, positional faithfulness and markedness
“NC effects”, Analyses of final devoicing
Handouts
11/8 Functional grounding and featural correspondence: “NC effects”
11/15 Contextual neutralization and positional faithfulness: voicing
Required readings
Pater, Joe. 2004. Austronesian nasal substitution and other NC effects. In J. McCarthy, ed., Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell [Edited and slightly revised version of Pater 1999].
And one of:
Lombardi, Linda. 1999. Positional faithfulness and voicing assimilation in Optimality Theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17, 267-302.
Steriade, Donca. 2008. The phonology of perceptibility effects: The P-map and its consequences for constraint organization. In Kristin Hanson & Sharon Inkelas (eds.), The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky, 151-80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Originally circulated in 2001.]*
Blevins, Juliette. 2006. A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology. Theoretical Linguistics 32:117-65.
Further readings
Correspondence theory: McCarthy (2008) Ch. 4
Myers (1997: ms.) on gaps in the typology of NC effects and phonologization, Coetzee et al. (2007) on Tswana post-nasal devoicing, Kiparsky (2006) on Blevins’ coda voicing cases.
Jesney (2009: CLS) on positional licensing problems and the HS solution, Jesney (to appear: JJM and JP eds.) on HG and positional markedness.
Week 12, 13 (Nov. 20-29)
Inductive bias, experimentation and modeling
Handouts
11/20 Artificial phonology learning and inductive biases
10/27 Wug-testing and “naturalness”
11/29 Modeling inductive bias, wrap-up
Required readings
Hayes, Bruce, Kie Zuraw, Péter Siptár and Zsuzsa Londe. 2009. Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmony. Language 85: 822-863.
Moreton, Elliott. 2008. Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology 25:83-127.
Wilson, Colin. 2006. Learning Phonology with Substantive Bias: An Experimental and Computational Study of Velar Palatalization. Cognitive Science 30.5:945-982
Further readings
Culbertson, Jennifer, Paul Smolensky, Colin Wilson. To appear. Cognitive biases, linguistic universals, and constraint-based grammar learning. In TopiCS in Cognitive Science, issue on computational psycholinguistics, J. Hale & D. Reitter, Eds.
Moreton, Elliott (2012). Inter- and intra-dimensional dependencies in implicit phonotactic learning. Journal of Memory and Language 67 (1):165-183.
Moreton, Elliott and Joe Pater. To appear. Structure and substance in artificial-phonology learning. Part 1: Structure, Part II: Substance. In Language and Linguistics Compass. (revised version of earlier ms. circulated as Learning of Artificial Phonology: A Review).
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.
Yu, Alan. 2011.On measuring phonetic precursor robustness: A response to Moreton 2008. Phonology 28: 491-518.
Week 14 (Dec. 4-6)
Student presentations
Week 15 (Dec. 11)
Homework 6 discussion, Solver input file with new candidates (see also other Homework 6 files above)
Arto Anttila’s comments on “Homework 6 discussion”