On Tuesday, we will finish up our discussion of “look-ahead”, and move on to some serial OT/HG explorations in OT-Help. We’ll hear from Claire on some work that she’s done on Chaha palatization, and we’ll discuss the results of submitting JJM’s files to the HG typology calculator. If you are interested in seeing how HG can do grandfather effects, you can look at my handout from the first UMMM.

Robert has done some updates to OT-Help. One that will be of interest for our upcoming discussion of targeted constraints is the ability to implement positive constraints. The new version is available on the software page, and the change log explains how to use positive constraints. Thanks Robert!

Thursday we’ll discuss the first four chapters of Crawley. Please bring a discussion point or two. Emily will also tell us about some new work on stress-epenthesis interactions in Harmonic Serialism.

On Tuesday, I’ll talk about the Serial Harmonic Grammar paper. Please read it if you haven’t already. I’ll mostly focus on elaborating on points that are made only in passing in the paper itself. I can still make some final changes to the paper, so if you spot any infelicities, typos, mistakes, etc. please let me know!

At the end of the class, Emily asked whether we might talk on Thursday about how one goes from theory to experiment. That’s actually going to be a recurrent theme throughout the course, so instead of trying to figure out how to talk about it on Thursday, let’s instead keep it in mind as we read papers, which will give us concrete examples around which we can build our discussion. I’ve written some initial thoughts about this on the page “Theory to Experiment”.

So my suggestion for Thursday is that we do some work using OT-Help 2. This should help meet the goal of better understanding serial HG/OT, as well as moving us toward a public release of the software. If at least a couple people would commit to trying to implement something in HS, we should easily have plenty to talk about. As I mentioned in class, one possibility would be to look at the relationship between the languages generated with JJM’s files in OT and HG.

Please post a comment if you’d be willing to do tell the rest of us about some OT-Help 2.0 explorations, and let us know roughly what you’ll try!

To get started in Ot-Help 2.0, try using the files that JJM and I have created. A few quick notes (we know we need to write a manual). You can use built-in, and user-defined constraints. In my files, I use the built-in Parse constraint, which penalizes each character (letter?) not surrounded by parentheses. Markedness constraints get defined in the constraint files, faithfulness in the operation files (though they also need to be in the constraint files). Operations take a regular expression as input, and output a string (not a regex itself). See JJM’s notes on the way that these transformations can be set up.

In response to Kevin’s question about the Align-Head /W-S interaction in HG:

1. I should have pointed out that it’s not entirely clear that the HG result is problematic. That’s the line I take in the Cognitive Science paper – see section 3.1 (this is also the section that talks briefly about the HG-HS connection).
2. My best shot at doing some Align-Head effects without gradient alignment is in section 1.2 of this handout.

As a follow-up to the point Karen raised at the end of class, I made two OT-Help files, one with Ident-Nas, and one with Max-Nas. I use capitals for nasalized vowels. Try each of these out in parallel HG (“Find HG solution”), and try to understand why Karen is right – the strange pattern is impossible with Max-Nas. To think about it, you might find it useful to go to the “comparative view”, and remember that the sum of the weights preferring a winner has to be greater than that for the constraints preferring any loser. This should allow you to construct a set of inconsistent inequalities. You might also want to think about whether a parallel theory with only Max-Feature constraints is viable, and whether the answer changes in serial OT/HG. We’ll talk about this on Tuesday.

Remember to come to class Thursday with a discussion point for each of the three papers. We’ll also need to plan for the following Thursday, so think about what might be useful to advance our understanding of HG and HS.