The following papers should give you an idea of my research interests. Unless otherwise indicated, the documents are in pdf format.
Timeless. BibTeX bibliography with almost 4,100 entries for phonological and phonetic references. It is very useable but has some duplicate entries. There is also an old Endnote version, which I've stopped updating.
2008. Interface constraints and frequency in Russian compound stress. To appear in the Proceedings of the 17th Meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. Edited by Jodi Reich, Maria Babyonyshev, and Darya Kavitskaya. Michigan Slavic Publishers.
Russian normally has only one stress per word, but compounds may have more than one stress. We conducted a production study and identified the following conditions under which secondary stress surfaces. First, secondary stress appears on the left-hand stem of a compound if it is present underlyingly and is separated by at least two syllables from the main stress. Thus, underlying stress surfaces in /obo'ron-o-spo'sobnost/ [obo,ronospos'obnost] `defense capability' but not in /golov-o-'lomka/ [golovo'lomka] `puzzle' or /'les-o-rub/ [leso'rub] `lumberjack.' Second, secondary stress may appear even if it not present underlyingly, and if it is close to the main stress, in compounds that have low surface frequency. We analyze this as evidence for a constraint indexed to low-frequency words that requires each morphological stem to project a phonological prominence. Thus, low frequency requires a more robust indication of morphological complexity, which is signaled in Russian by secondary stress.
2007. The Reduplicative Template in Tonkawa. Phonology 24:3.[Pre-publication version. Please cite from published version.]
Generalized Template Theory holds that templatic restrictions on reduplicative morphemes follow from independent, general principles. Under lexically indexed constraint theory, however, reduplicants are in no way special---morpheme-specific constraints may apply just to reduplicants. This article presents reduplication patterns in Tonkawa, which are argued to require reduplicant-specific constraints. In Tonkawa, the reduplicant is limited in size to CV and is usually syllabified as a light syllable. Even though the language typically prefers heavy syllables word-initially, they are light if the syllable is a reduplicative prefix. This size restriction is backcopied onto the first syllable of the base. In the context of the prosodic phonology of Tonkawa, this pattern can only be understood if there is a reduplicant-specific prohibition against heavy syllables. This prohibition is formulated in terms of lexically indexed constraints on the reduplicant, which allows for a nuanced understanding of the emergent CV-template.
Tonkawa reduplication data I am making the data that I used for this paper available in a tab-delimited text file. Included in the file are all the forms I could find in Hoijer's 1933 grammar that were unambiguously reduplicated.
2007. Levantine Epenthesis: Phonetics, Phonology, and Learning. Poster from the Stanford Workshop on Variation, Gradience, and Frequency in Phonology. Joint work with Nancy Hall.
In Levantine varieties of Arabic, stress is opaque: it avoids epenthetic vowels. This is exceptionless in Lebanese but not in Palestinian Arabic, some of whose speakers have transparent stress on epenthetic vowels. We show that the phonological distinction in stress assignment correlates with a phonetic distinction between epenthetic and lexical vowels, which is more pronounced for Lebanese speakers than for Palestinians.
2007. DEP: Beyond Epenthesis. Linguistic Inquiry 38:4, pp. 759-770. [Pre-publication version. Please cite from published version.]
DEP is often informally characterized as a constraint against epenthesis, but its actual effects are more diverse. In the domain of base-reduplicant correspondence, DEP can have the effect of blocking deletion in the base, as in Tonkawa reduplication. In the domain of output-output correspondence, DEP in effect requires deletion of underlying material in derived forms, as in English. These consequences follow straightforwardly from the correspondence-theoretic definition of DEP as a bi-level faithfulness constraint, and they cannot be derived without such a constraint.
2008(?). Acoustics of Unstressable Vowels in Lebanese Arabic. Co-authored with Nancy Hall. To appear in Steve Parker (ed.), Phonological Argumentation. Essays on Evidence and Motivation. London: Equinox. e-mail me for a copy.
We show that epenthetic and lexical vowels in Lebanese Arabic, which are often transcribed as identical, are acoustically distinct: epenthetic vowels are either shorter or backer or both. We argue that this incomplete neutralization is the result of phonetics optionally accessing an intermediate level of phonological derivation. This is formalized in Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC): epenthesis requires a multi-step candidate chain, and phonetics can access any step of the chain. Furthermore, we suggest that the acoustic distinction helps learners construct the correct candidate chains for words with epenthetic vs. lexical vowels.
2006. On the status of voiced obstruents in Tswana: Against *ND. Co-authored with Elizabeth Zsiga and One Tlale. In C. Davis, A. Deal, and Y. Zabbal (eds.) The Proceedings of NELS 36. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Tswana is sometimes presented as a case of an "unnatural" phonological process that goes counter to the phonetically grounded constraint against voiceless stops after nasals (*NC). The language reportedly bans not voiceless but voiced stops after nasals ([bata] 'look for,' [mpata] 'look for me'). A closer look at the phonology of Tswana and a phonetic study suggests that this description is not accurate. For some speakers, no stops are ever voiced, including post-nasal stops. For others, the consonants are voiceless not only after nasals but also between vowels. The study shows that Tswana provides no evidence against *NC.
2004. Relational hierarchies in OT: the case of Syllable Contact. Phonology 21:2, pp. 201-250. [Pre-publication version. Please cite from published version.]
A number of phonological laws require adjacent elements to stand a certain distance apart from each other on some prominence scale. Thus, according to the Syllable Contact Law, the greater the sonority slope between the coda and the following onset, the better. Languages such as Faroese, Icelandic, Sidamo, Kazakh, and Kirgiz select different thresholds for acceptable sonority slope. This article proposes a theory for deriving hierarchies of relational constraints such as the Syllable Contact Law from prominence scales in the constraint set CON in Optimality Theory. The proposal is compared to two alternative approaches, non-hierarchical constraints and the local conjunction of constraint hierarchies, which are argued to make undesirable empirical and theoretical predictions.
2004. Minimal Reduplication as a Paradigm Uniformity Effect. In B. Schmeiser, V. Chand, A. Kelleher, and A. Rodriguez, eds. The Proceedings of the 22nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 265-278.
Reduplicative affixes are often limited in size to a single syllable or even a smaller unit. I argue that this restriction follows from disparate sources and is not homogeneous. In one type of pattern, RED constitutes the largest syllable possible, i.e., a single heavy syllable. This restriction follows from the interaction of constraints on foot form and parsing. In another type of pattern, whcih I term minimal reduplication, RED is limited to the smallest size possible, e.g., a single consonant. I attribute this restriction to paradigm uniformity: the smaller the affix, the more similar the reduplicated form is to its paradigmatic base, the non-reduplicated form.
2003. Deriving Economy: Syncope in Optimality Theory. Ph.D. dissertation. Graduate Linguistics Student Association, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Rutgers Optimality Archive #610.
2002. Relational hierarchies in OT. In L. Mikkelsen and C. Potts, eds. Proceedings of the 21st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. pp. 113-126. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
2002. Exceptions to sonority generalizations. In CLS 38: The Main Session. Papers from the 38th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. April 25-27, Chicago: CLS.
2002. Economy of representation and syncope. Handout of a talk given at the MIT Phonology Circle, October 17, 2002, Cambridge, MA.
2001. Falling sonority onsets, loanwords, and Syllable Contact. In Andronis, Mary, Christopher Ball, Heidi Elston and Sylvain Neuvel, eds. CLS 37: The Main Session. Papers from the 37th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol. 1. Chicago: CLS.
2001. Split scrambling: barriers as violable constraints. (short version) In K. Megerdoomian and L. A. Bar-el, eds. Proceedings of the 20th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 220-223. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
2001. Split scrambling: barriers as violable constraints. (long version) In RuLing Papers II, eds. Graham Horwood and Se-Kyung Kim. pp. 49-82. New Brunswick: Rutgers University.
Last updated October 2007.
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