Seminar on English PhonologyLinguistics 696bHammondSpring 2005OverviewEnglish enjoys a privileged place in phonological theory for several rea-sons. First, as the language of instruction, it is an extremely convenienttest case. Second, there is a huge phonological literature and extensiveliteratures on all related areas, e.g. experimental work, morphology,syntax, phonetics, etc. Third, generative phonology was born with thepublication of SPE (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), and the problems andissues of English phonology can thus be seen to have virtually definedthat theory. Finally, and most importantly , the language exhibits anumber of really interesting properties, e.g. ‘historical’ vowel shift alter-nations, extensive borrowing from other languages, ambiguous syllablestructure, quasi-phonemic stress, quaint phonemic inventory, unintel-ligible quantity system, an impossible spelling system, etc.This course will treat the main issues of English phonology fromvowel shift through prosody. My own focus will be on what sense w ecan make of these patt erns fr om a distributional perspective, i.e. doesthe frequency of a pattern bear on its analysis? This focus is fueled bythe observation that many interesting aspects of English phonology arequite exception-laden and the fact that experimental work shows thatEnglish speakers are sensitive to the frequency of the patterns of theirlanguage.Instructorinstructor Mike Hammondoffice hours TBAoffice Douglass 206hours Tues. & Thurs. 11-12 or by appointment1PrerequisitesI will assume people have had the equivalent of Linguistics 410/510,but an energetic student might pull it off wi thout that. I’ll assume aworking familiarity with Optimality Theory, but the same point holds.RequirementsStudents will write a paper with a number of ancillary requirements:abstract, outline, two presentations on the paper, and an optionalrough draft.Papers do not have to be on English, nor do they have to use OT.They can be experimental, computational, phonetic, psycholinguistic,or even phonological. The only substantive requirement is th at theyreflect the content of the seminar in some way. Dissertators should seeme about special accommodation.abstract 10%outline 10%presentation #1 5%presentation #2 5%final paper 70%TextsChomsky, N. & M. Halle (1968) The Sound Pattern of English, MIT Press,Cambridge.Hammond, M. (1999) The Phonology of English, Oxford U. Press, Ox-ford.2ScheduleWeek Date Topic Reading Due1 1/12 Overview SPE ch. 12 1/19 Stress SPE chs. 2-33 1/26 Stress SPE ch. 34 2/2 Vowel shift SPE chs. 4-55 2/9 Vowel shift6 2/16 History SPE ch. 67 2/23 Syllables MH chs. 3-48 3/2 Syllables & feet MH ch. 69 3/9 Feet MH ch. 73/16 BREAK10 3/23 Morphology TBA Abstract11 3/30 Frequency TBA Outline12 4/6 Presentations13 4/13 Presentations14 4/20 TBA TBA Op tional draft15 4/27 Presentations16 5/4 Presentations17 5/11 NO CLASS Final paperVarious other readings will be made available and/or assigned as