LSA 304: Correspondence and the phonological lexicon

Donca Steriade | six-week course | TuTh 3:30 – 5:15, 106 Moffitt Hall

This course begins with an introduction to Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993 / 2004); McCarthy 2002). The first two weeks introduce basic analytic techniques in OT and outline some of its major results. The course then turns to a closer examination of the Correspondence component of an OT grammar. This consists of the constraints that preserve the phonological similarity between lexically related forms (e.g. underlying and surface representations; bases and their derivatives; members of the same inflectional or derivational paradigm); and of the grammatical architecture upon which the evaluation of morphologically complex forms is built. We will examine the evidence that motivates different versions of this architecture. The basic phenomena we analyze by reference to Correspondence Theory include cyclicity, level ordering, identity between reduplicants and their bases, intra-paradigmatic identity and distinctness.

Reading: Selected materials available online.

Prerequisites: A first course in phonology.

Areas of linguistics: Phonetics, phonology, and morphology