Course Information

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

• Syllabus

Course Log

25 Mar

• Today we began exploring analyses of stress with Nanti.

18-20 Mar

• SPRING BREAK

13 Mar

• We studied Strother-Garcia’s analysis of ITB syllabification.
• For background on logical transductions, see
  • Heinz, forthcomin (a short review)
  • Slides from LSA 2019 Summer Institute Course
  • The book (most thorough, almost done!)

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:
  • The original description and analysis Dell and Elemedlaoui 1985
  • The constraint-based analysis in the Prince and Smolensky 1993 which introduced OT
  • Strother-Garcia’s 2018 analysis with logic and model theory
  • Note: Frampton 2011 is another important paper (which informed SG18).
• 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?