John McCarthy

John McCarthy has a long-standing interest in the properties of and constraints on serial derivations. After stops at various roadside rest areas (such as sympathy and comparative markedness), his journey has brought him to Harmonic Serialism, which brings together key ideas from both OT and derivational approaches. His current research is focused on discovering differences between Harmonic Serialism and parallel OT, particularly in problematic areas like locality effects.

Joe Pater

Joe Pater has been exploring the general merits of Harmonic Grammar as a framework for phonological analysis and typology, and is also working on various applications in the modeling of language learning. In Harmonic Serialism, he is particularly interested in derivational prosody and its interactions with segmental phonology, as well as computational approaches to typology calculation and learning.

Emily Elfner

Emily's research focuses on prosodic parsing and opacity. She has been investigating the role of gradualness and serial evaluation in syllabification and stress-epenthesis interactions. She has also been working on syntax-prosody interactions in Irish.

Karen Jesney

Karen's research aims to address the predictions that various models of grammar and learning make for patterns of development in child language acquisition. She is also interested the typological (and other) consequences of ranked vs. weighted constraint grammars.

Wendell Kimper

Wendell has been investigating the role of serial evaluation in accounting for local and global patterns in phonological variation. He is also working on exploring the consequences of HS for reduplicative phenomena (with John McCarthy and Kevin Mullin) and various aspects of vowel harmony typology.

Kathryn Pruitt

Kathryn's main interests are stress and theories of metrical structure. She has recently worked on metrical theory within Harmonic Serialism and is currently working with John McCarthy on how to reconcile the OT principle of Richness of the Base with evidence for iterative structure-building in HS. She is also currently supervising Magnolia Mutuc on a project which will explore the typological consequences of different sets of metrical and rhythmic constraints in HS using OT-Help 2.0.

Kevin Mullin

Kevin Mullin has been investigating faithfulness-to-stress and lexically-indexed constraints in Guahibo under parallel OT assumptions, reduplication in harmonic serialism (with Wendell Kimper and John J. McCarthy), and modeling phonologization via articifial learning (with Joe Pater and Kyle Root).

Brian Smith

Brian has been investigating doubly-marked phonotactic and paradigmatic gaps in the framework of Harmonic Grammar. He has also been designing a web experiment with Joe Pater and John Griffin to test the effects of context on French schwa deletion.

Robert Staubs

Robert has been working on the development of OT Help 2 for typology calculation in Harmonic Serialism and Serial Harmonic Grammar. He has also been investigating computational approaches to hidden structure learning in phonology (with Joe Pater and others).