Joe Pater writes:
On behalf of the phonetics and phonology faculty, I'm very happy to be able to announce that we will be joined next year by Sang-Im Lee-Kim, currently finishing her PhD at NYU, and Robert Staubs, currently finishing his PhD in our own department.
Robert will be teaching the graduate pro-seminar in the fall, and Sang-Im will be teaching the graduate seminar in the spring. Preliminary descriptions of the seminars are included below. They will also be leading the sound seminar and teaching undergraduate classes.
Staubs, Ling 730 Fall: Frequency in Phonological Typology.
Traditional generative models of phonological typology touch only indirectly on questions of frequency, focusing instead on differences between possible and impossible languages. In this seminar we will examine a variety of approaches to answering the question of why some phonological patterns are more common than others.
We will discuss two principal ways of incorporating phonetic biases into the frequencies of phonological typology. The first is phonetically-driven phonology (e.g. in Hayes et al. 2004), which adds phonetic effects into more typical generative models. The second is Blevins’ (2004) Evolutionary Phonology, which instead seeks to explain phonological typology as originating only from phonetic effects paired with general principles of analogy.
In addition to phonetic concerns, we will look at models which seek to explain typological frequencies based on generative models themselves. Our main departure will be representations in Optimality Theory-like grammars. We will first discuss approaches such as Coetzee (2002) and Riggle (2010/in prep.) based on counting the number of rankings describing a pattern, then compare this approach to one based in formal learnability as discussed e.g. by Moreton & Pater (2012).
Finally, we will consider learning-based approaches which are comparatively divorced from grammatical theory, in particular the work of Kirby and colleagues on iterated learning and the emergence of structure across generations of language learning. We will ask what this work, typically focused on non-phonological domains, has to say about “emergence" in a phonological context.
Lee-Kim, Ling 751 Spring: Data-oriented approaches to phonological patterns
This graduate seminar investigates how evidence from articulation and acoustics can provide insights into phonological patterns. Focusing on the importance of empirical evidence, we will review articles that employ ultrasound imaging and other articulatory methods as well as various acoustic techniques in order to examine the phonetic bases of phonological phenomena. In addition, the contribution of morphological structure to both phonetic data and phonological patterns will be introduced to probe the interaction between various linguistic factors that are responsible for the emerging phonological patterns.
Specific topics to be addressed include phonological representation of schwa (Davidson 2005; Gick & Wilson 2006), transparent vowels (Gick, Pulleyblank, Fiona & Mutaka 2006; Benus & Gafos2007;Allen,Pulleyblank &Ajíbóyè2013),consonantharmony(Walker, Byrd & Mpiranya 2008; Zellou 2013) and sonority (Parker 2008; Proctor & Walker 2012). In the remainder of the seminar, we will proceed to discuss the interaction between phonology and other modules in grammar. Specifically, topics regarding the morphology-phonology interface will be discussed based on evidence from both acoustics and articulation (Cho 2001; Warner, Jongman, Sereno & Kemps 2004; Sugahara & Turk 2009; Lee-Kim, Davidson & Hwang 2013).
While familiarizing students with the current experimental methodology that can be used to effectively address phonological questions, the seminar ultimately aims to help students develop their own research questions and determine viable methodologies to test their hypotheses.
