Investigations in Optimality Theory
Typology, Learning, and Modeling
Recent News:
John McCarthy will give a short course called "Harmonic Serialism: Postcards from the Edge" at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on December 14-15. He will then give an invited talk on his joint work with Kathryn Pruitt entitled "Sources of Phonological Structure" at CONSOLE XVII, also at the Autònoma.
Recent and ongoing work at UMass (and beyond) on Harmonic Serialism (HS) and Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains: in table form.
Upcoming presentations at the LSA:
- "Stress-epenthesis interactions in Harmonic Serialism", Emily Elfner
- "Learning Hidden Structure with a Log-Linear Model of Grammar", Joe Pater, David Smith (UMass Computer Science), Robert Staubs, Karen Jesney and Ramgopal Mettu (UMass Electrical Engineering) [abstract]
John McCarthy's paper "The P-Map in Harmonic Serialism" has been posted on the Rutgers Optimality Archive. ROA 1052
Wendell Kimper presented his paper "Non-/Iterativity in Vata ATR Harmony" at UMMM (the UMass MIT Meeting) on November 1st.
Presentations at the KNAW Colloquium on Language Acquisition and Optimality Theory in Amsterdam:
- "Uniformity effects as a consequence of learning with lexical constraints", Karen Jesney
- "Systemic Simplicity in Phonological Learning and Typology", Joe Pater
Presentations at MUMM (the MIT UMass Meeting) [May 9th]:
- "Harmonic Serialism and stress-epenthesis interactions in Levantine Arabic", Emily Elfner
- "Licensing in Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar", Karen Jesney.
- "The null parse in Harmonic Grammar", Brian Smith
Karen Jesney presented her paper "Licensing in multiple contexts: an argument for Harmonic Grammar" at CLS 45 [April 16-18].
Presentations at HUMDRUM (an OT workshop) [April 18th]:
- "Harmonic Serialism and stress-epenthesis interactions in Levantine Arabic", Emily Elfner
- "Constraints on what's not there: The role of serial derivations in subtractive truncation", Wendell Kimper
- "Guahibo stress", Kevin Mullin
- "Cumulative constraint interaction and the null parse", Brian Smith