Instructors:            Adam Albright                          Daniel Asherov
Email:                      albright@mit.edu                      asherov@mit.edu

Lecture:                   TR 10-11:30am, 26-168

Office hours:          TBA

Website:                  https://canvas.mit.edu/courses/25071

Prerequisites:   24.961 or equivalent or permission

Course requirements: 

• Weekly readings
• Participation
• 6 written assignments (data analysis and critical reading): graded
• Term paper, presented in class and written up

Dates to remember:

• April 5rd: date by which you should have talked to us about your term paper topic
• May 9 and May 14: student presentations of final projects
• May 21:  final paper write-up due

Description:

This course discusses the phenomena whose analysis requires a theory of correspondence that spells out how the grammar enforces the similarity between certain pairs of phonological representations, such as the input (e.g. a lexical entry) and  the output (e.g. a surface form derived from that lexical entry).

Issues discussed include the nature of elements related by correspondence (features or segments?), the nature of correspondence constraints (context sensitive or context free) and the division of labor between markedness and correspondence constraints. We explore the fact that correspondence rankings bear a relation to auditory similarity relations.

In the second part of 24.962 we focus on the pairs of representations related by correspondence (input and output, base and reduplicant, base and derivative). This requires us to analyze phonological phenomena that are sensitive to morphological structure, including reduplication, cyclicity, level ordering, derived environment effects, opaque rule interactions, and morpheme structure constraints.     

Schedule of topics (subject to revision)

Here is a page with some ideas about possible squib topics, for inspiration.