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
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?