Course: TThu 09:30-10:50, SBS 216
Instructor: Jeffrey Heinz, jeffrey.heinz@stonybrook.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 11:30-1pm, Wednesday 2pm-3:30pm and by appointment
Materials
Course Log
08 May
06 May
- Today we enjoyed presentations from Matthew, Dorothy, William, and Abed.
01 May
- Today we enjoyed presentations from Ola, Jacob, and Anton.
28 Apr
- We finished discussion of the BMP.
- We reviewed the contents of this course.
- We discussed current research directions in phonology more broadly.
24 Apr
22 Apr
17 Apr
- We finished our discussion of Rose and Walker 2011.
- Reading and schedule for the next last weeks:
15 Apr
10 Apr
- We finished our discussion of tone and autosegmental representations.
08 Apr
03 Apr
01 Apr
- We finished discussing the typology of stress in the handout.
- We began discussing ISL functions.
27 Mar
- We reviewed basic analytical and typological facts with this handout on stress.
- We revisited Nanti and tried to write down a complete analysis.
- Additional reading on computational analyses of stress:
- For next Tuesday: Read Chandlee and Heinz 2018
25 Mar
- Today we began exploring analyses of stress with Nanti.
18-20 Mar
13 Mar
- We studied Strother-Garcia’s analysis of ITB syllabification.
- For background on logical transductions, see
11 Mar
- We finished our discusson of Dell and Elemedlaoui.
- We studied Prince and Smolensky’s analysis of ITB syllabification.
06 Mar
- We continued discussion of the Hakha Lai data.
- We began studying syllabification in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber (ITB). Over the next week we will study three different views:
- For Tuesday (3/11), please read:
- the first three sections of Dell and Elemedlaoui (1985).
- chapter 2 (pp. 11-23) of Prince and Smolensky (1993).
- For Thursday (3/13), please read Strother-Garcia (2018).
04 Mar
- Some generic tips on writing in response to the Ilokano assignment.
- Introductions should include the conclusions/results of the study and explain in broad strokes the arguments that you will be making to lead to those conclusions.
- Don’t introduce your analysis all at once. Incrementally introduce rules and constraints. A good rule of thumb is to proceed one generalization at a time, checking how the analysis for each generalization potentialy interacts with the ones previously discussed.
- Details matter. Always gloss forms, don’t mistranscribe the data, use standard definitions, use comparative tableaus correctly, don’t make errors in OT tableaus, and so on.
- We finished our discussed of Vaux (2008) with a focus on issues related to opacity, optionality, and ineffability.
- We began a brief discussion of the data in Hakha Lai due March 11, 2025.
27 Feb
- We discussed Vaux (2008) with a focus on issues related to opacity, optionality, and ineffability.
- Time permitting: Polish Data
- Assignment: Hakha Lai due March 11, 2025.
25 Feb
- We discussed Stratal Phonology (Bermudez-Otero 2018).
- For Thursday, read Vaux (2008), chapter 2 of this book.
20 Feb
We discussed data bearing on the notion of the cycle and lexical phonology.
For Tuesday, please read sections 1 and 2 of Bermudez-Otero 2018, which was published in In S.J. Hannahs & Anna R. K. Bosch (eds.), 2018, The Routledge handbook of phonological theory, 100-134. Abingdon: Routledge.
18 Feb
- We discussed a couple more of McCathy’s arguments against parallel OT in favor of HS (positional faithfulness and too many solutions).
13 Feb
- We discussed Harmonic Grammar vis a vis OT, and its probabilistic variants Noisy HG and MaxEnt HG, with a focus on typological predictions. See Pater 2016 for an overview and Magri and Antilla’s 2022 MS for analysis of this topic.
- We also reviewed the architecture of Harmonic Serialism. See McCarthy 2010 for an overview.
11 Feb
- We finished discussing Chapter 2 of McCarthy 2008,in particular richness of the base, lexical optimization, and recursive constraint demotion. We also discussed chapter 3.
- Reminder: Ilokano squib is due Feb 18, 2025 (1 week from today).
06 Feb
- We discussed some excerpts from Chapter 2 of McCarthy 2008. We got through page 48.
- We sketched a rule-based analysis of Ilokano and discussed it vis a vis our descriptive generalizations and OT.
- For Tuesday, identify which other excerpts you would like to discsuss, and other items that are not on the excerpts from the later section.
- Also for Tuesday, read Chapter 3 of McCathy 2008.
04 Feb
- Today we discussed in more detail an OT analysis for the Ilokano assignment. We discussed harmonic bounding, how to make ranking arguments using entailed ranking conditions (W/L/e), how to interpret rows of W/L/e more generally, markedness hierarchies, and a couple different ways to handle optionality.
- Finish reading chapter 2 for Thursday.
30 Jan 2025
- We discussed the first three sections of Chapter 1 (McCarthy 2008).
- We began analyzing some words in Ilokano. This assignment (squib) is due February 13. Chapter 3 of McCarthy 2008 provides very helpful advice for how to write phonological analysis.
- For next Tuesday, finish reading Chapter 1 and read sections 1 and 2 of chapter 2 (McCarthy 2008).
28 Jan 2025
- We went over the syllabus.
- We discussed the introduction to this course. Please finish reading it before Thursday.
- For Thursday, please read sections 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 of McCarthy 2008
- Section 1.2 asks “Why Must Constraints Be Violable?” Is McCarthy’s argument convincing? Why or why not?
- In section 1.3, McCarthy writes “OT itself does not say much about the nature of constraints, beyond distinguishing between markedness and faithfulness. OT is a theory of how constraints interact with one another; it isn’t a theory of what the constraints are, nor is it a theory of representations.” Why do you think this is or isn’t true, and what does it meand for a theory of phonoligy?