A [Seminar on Computational Phonology]

b goes to a in the context b __ b, left-to-right application

LING83600: Seminar on Computational Phonology

Spring 2023

CUNY Graduate Center

Instructor: Prof. Kyle Gorman

Lecture: 4:15-6:15 Tuesday (6421)

Office hours: Wednesday tbd and by appointment

Synopsis

This seminar will cover three major topics in computational phonology:

Substance-freeness: the claim that phonology, narrowly construed, does not incorporate information about phonetic "substance" (like facts about articulation or audition)
Subregularity and weak determinism: the claim that phonotactic grammars are subregular languages, and that (morpho)phonological mappings are weakly deterministic functions
Phonotactic modeling: attempts to model human judgments of wellformedness or "wordlikeness" using computational models of the lexicon

In addition to lectures by the instructor, there will be many guest discussants and lecturers. Students will be expected present and lead discussions of the readings.

Accommodations

The instructor will attempt to provide all reasonable accommodations to students upon request. If you believe you are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, please direct accommodations requests to Vice President for Student Affairs Matthew G. Schoengood.

Attendance

Students are extended to attend all lectures and practica. However, students who have reason to believe they may be contagious for COVID-19 or other infectious diseases should attend the course online after contacting the instructor. Other absences will not be excused, and the instructor reserves the right to tie grades to attendance records.

Integrity

In line with the Student Handbook policies on plagiarism, students are expected to complete their own work.

The instructor reserves the right to refer violations to the Academic Integrity Officer.

Respect

Students are expected to be considerate of your peers and to treat them with respect during class discussions.

Schedule

(Please note that this is subject to change and will be updated as we go.)

1/31		I-phonology		Isac & Reiss 2013 (ch. 1)
2/7		Substance-free phonology		Appelbaum 1996 [Zainab]; Hammarberg 1976 [Martine]; Hale & Reiss 2000 [Selin]; Reiss 2017 [Hector]
2/14		Poverty of the stimulus	Guest: Charles Reiss	Blevins 2004 (§9-9.1) [Stefanie]; Halle 1978 [Natasha]; Reiss & Volenec 2022
2/21	No class
2/28		Features I		Bale et al. 2014 [Amal]; Reiss 2022 [Aidan]; Volenec & Reiss 2020
3/7		Features II		Chen & Hulden 2018 [Natasha]; Gorman & Reiss in prep [Kyle]; Baković 2005 [Stefanie]
3/14		Logical phonology	Guest: Jane Chandlee	Fruehwald & Gorman 2011 [Han]; Baković 2007 [Scott]; Chandlee et al. 2018 [Vinny]; Heinz 2018
3/21		Local phonology	Guest: Caleb Belth	Belth 2022; Chandlee & Heinz 2018 [Magda]
3/28		Long-distance phonology	Guest: ~~Rim Dabbous &~~ Fred Mailhot	Dabbous et al. 2022; Mailhot & Reiss 2007 [Fred]; Payne 2017 [Martine]
4/4		Tone	Guest: Adam Jardine	Jardine 2016 [Han]; Jardine et al. 2021 [Hector]
4/11	No class
4/18		Phonotactics	Guest: Jeff Heinz	Gorman 2011 [Kyle]; Gorman 2013 (ch. 4) [Kyle]; Heinz 2010 [Jeff]
4/25		Phonotactic modeling	Guest: Colin Wilson	Gorman 2013 (ch. 2) [Selin]; Hayes & Wilson 2008; Wilson & Gallagher 2018 [Kyle]
5/2		Wellformedness judgments	Guest: Karthik Durvasula	Dupoux et al. 1999 [Aidan]; Durvasula & Kahng 2015 [Zainab, Karthik]; Kabak & Idsardi 2007 [Magda]
5/9		Morphotactics; student presentations	~~Guest: Aniello De Santo~~	Aksënova & De Santo 2018 [Amal]

Bibliography

Aksënova, A. and De Santo, A. 2018. Strict locality in morphological derivations. In Proceedings of the 53rd Meeting of Chicago Linguistics Society, pages 1-12.
Appelbaum, I. 1996. The lack of invariance problem and the goal of speech perception. In Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, pages 1541-1544.
Armstrong, S. L., Gleitman, L. R., and Gleitman, H. 1983. What some concepts might not be. Cognition 13: 263-308.
Bailey, T. and Han, U. 2001. Determinants of wordlikeness: phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods. Journal of Memory and Language 44: 568-591.
Baković, E. 2005. Antigemination, assimilation and the determination of identity. Phonology 22: 279-315.
Baković, E. 2007. A revised typology of opaque generalisations. Phonology 24: 217-259.
Bale, A., Papillon, M., and Reiss, C. 2014. Targeting underspecified segments: a formal analysis of feature-changing and feature-filling rules. Lingua 148: 240-253.
Belth, C. 2022. [Untitled]. Ms., University of Michigan.
Blevins, J. 2004. Evolutionary Phonology: The Emergence of Sound Patterns. Cambridge University Press.
Chandlee, J. Heinz, J., and Jardine, A. 2018. Input Strictly Local opaque maps. Phonology 35: 171-205.
Chandlee, J. and Heinz, J. 2018. Strict locality and phonological maps. Linguistic Inquiry 49: 23-59.
Chen, H. and Hulden, M. 2018. The computational complexity of distinctive feature minimization. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2018, pages 542-547.
Dabbous, R., Leduc, M., Mousavi, F., Reiss, C., and Shen, D. T.-C. 2021. Satisfying long-distance relationships (without tiers): a strictly anti-local approach to phonology. Ms., Concordia University.
Dolatian, H. and Heinz, J. 2018. Modeling reduplication with 2-way finite-state transducers. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 66-77.
Dupoux, E., Kakehi, K., Hirose, Y., Pallier, C., and Mehler, J. 1999. Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: a perceptual illusion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 25, 1568-1578.
Durvasula, K., and Kahng, J. 2015. Illusory vowels in perceptual epenthesis: The role of phonological alternations. Phonology 32, 385-416.
Fruehwald, J. and Gorman, K. 2011. Cross-derivational feeding is epiphenomenal. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 2011: 36-50.
Gorman, K. 2011. A program for phonotactic theory. In Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Main Session, pages 79-93.
Gorman, K. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Hale, M. and Reiss, C. 2000. "Substance abuse" and "dysfunctionalism": current trends in phonology. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 157-169.
Hale, M. and Reiss, C. 2003. The subset principle in phonology: why the tabula can't be rasa. Journal of Linguistics 39: 219-244.
Halle, M. 1978. Knowledge unlearned and untaught: what speakers know about the sounds of their language. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, and G. A. Miller (ed.), Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality, pages 294-303. MIT Press.
Hayes, B. and Wilson, C. 2008. A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 379-440.
Heinz, J. 2010. Learning long-distance phonotactics. Linguistic Inquiry 41: 623-661.
Heinz, J. 2018. The computational nature of phonological generalizations. In L. Hyman and F. Plank (ed.), Phonological Typology, Phonetics and Phonology, pages 126-195. De Gruyter Mouton.
Hammarberg, R. 1976. The metaphysics of coarticulation. Journal of Phonetics 4: 353-363.
Isac, D. and Reiss, C. 2013. I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.
Jardine, A. 2016. Computationally, tone is different [unpublished long version]. Phonology 33: 247-283.
Jardine, A., Danis, N., and Iacoponi, L. 2021. A formal investigation of Q-Theory in comparison to autosegmental representations. Linguistic Inquiry 52: 333-357.
Kabak, B. and Idsardi, W. J. 2007. Perceptual distortions in the adaptation of English consonant clusters: Syllable structure or consonantal contact constraints? Language and Speech 50, 23-52.
Mailhot, F. and Reiss, C. 2007. Computing long-distance dependencies in vowel harmony. Biolinguistics 1: 28-48.
Markowska, M., Heinz, J., and Rambow, O. 2021. Finite-state models of Shupamem reduplication. In Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 212-221.
Pająk, B. and Baković, E. 2010. Assimilation, antigemination, and contingent optionality: the phonology of monoconsonantal proclitics in Polish. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28: 643-680.
Payne, A. 2017. All dissimilation is computationally subsequential. Language 93: e353-e371.
Rawski, J., Dolatian, H., Heinz, J., and Raimy, E. 2023. Regular and polyregular theories of reduplication. Glossa: 8: 1-38
Reiss, C. 2003. Quantification in structural descriptions: attested and unattested patterns. The Linguistic Review 20: 305-338.
Reiss, C. 2017. Substance free phonology. In S.J. Hannahs and A. Bosch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory, pages 425-452.
Reiss, C. 2022. Priority union and feature logic in phonology. Linguistic Inquiry 53: 199-209.
Reiss, C. and Volenec, V. 2022. Conquer primal fear: phonological features are innate and substance-free. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 67: 581-610.
Volenec, V. and Reiss, C. 2020. Formal generative phonology. Radical: A Journal of Phonology 2: 1-148.
Wilson, C. and Gallagher, G. 2018. Accidental gaps and surface-based phonotactic learning: a case study of South Bolivian Quechua. Linguistic Inquiry 49: 610-623.