Articulatory Phonology (AP) is a view of the sound structure of a language that tries to account both for its abstract aspect, contrast, alternation, and hierarchical structure, as well as its physical realization in speech production and perception. And it does so without assuming a dualistic mind-body distinction between phonology-phonetics. The key aspect of AP that allows is to be non-dualistic is a dynamical framework that allows for a principled (non-arbitrary) relation between symbolic/discrete entities and continuous motion.

This course teaches foundational concepts in computer science and mathematical linguistics as they apply to phonology. This material is related to rule-based and constraint-based theories of phonology including several varieties of SPE and OT including harmonic grammar. The course has two main foci. First, it will show how computational analysis allows the expressive power of the theories to be compared. Second, it will show how computational analysis can make significant inroads on problems relating to learning phonological patterns from data.

The computer-aided analysis of naturalistic or experimental speech data provides new insights into the nature of the language faculty and new means of testing linguistic theories. This course treats corpus methods for phonology, emphasizing connections between data mining, statistical testing, and phonological analysis (especially issues concerning productivity and potential discrepancies between different sources of linguistic data). The first week focuses on extracting distributions and predictors of variable phenomena (e.g.

The course has two goals. First, students will learn the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology and how to transcribe intonational tones and prosodic structure using the English ToBI transcription system, and second, students will be introduced to a model of prosodic typology which is based on intonational phonology of various languages described in the same AM framework.

This course will survey morphologically conditioned phonology, focusing on the range of effects exhibited cross-linguistically as well as the range of effects that can occur within a given language. Topics of particular focus will include:  the relationship between morphophonologyand process morphology; interleaving between phonology and morphology; non-derived environment blocking; reduplication, and more.

This course is an introduction to the theory and methods of phonological analysis. Each week we will focus on one of four main sets of theoretical assumptions: (1) representational assumptions about what phonological constituents are and what they consist of, (2) analytical assumptions about the kinds of evidence that are brought to bear on the question of the basic vs.

The course will cover theoretical approaches to rule-governed prosodic patterning in verse in the generative tradition. We will engage two groups of theoretical questions. (1) Metrical knowledge: how do metrical texts get their structure, and what is the nature of metrical representations and rules/constraints that govern them? (2) Variation: what is the nature of gradient metricality, how can it be discovered in a corpus, and how is it represented in grammar?

Existing theories about sound change focus either on the role of speakers or the role of listeners. However, members of a speech community are of course both speakers and listeners of their language. This course will investigate the relationship between the production and perception patterns of individual language users in ongoing sound changes. Questions such as the following will be considered: Do the production and perception patterns of an individual speaker change together, or does change in one modality precede that in the other modality?

A number of approaches to the syntax-prosody interaction will be introduced and compared: the transformational and cyclic approach of Chomsky & Halle, prosodic hierarchy, edge-based/alignment theory and recursive mapping will serve as main theoretical models. At the same time, different kinds of languages-intonational languages, tone language, phrase-based languages-will be investigated for their properties at the syntax-prosody interface, so that universals and language-specific phenomena can be kept apart.

In this course we will examine the prosodic phonology of words from a theoretical and typological perspective. Our initial concerns will be to determine the ways in which the word domain can receive phonological marking and to understand how these phonological markings should be interpreted. While we will cover clear cases of stress, tone, duration, and harmony, much of our focus will be on interpreting ambiguous cases of prosodic phenomena which may or may not be best analyzed in terms of “accent” (which we will attempt to define).