Teaching

Contents

• Syllabus (PDF, 58 kB)
• Week 1: Intro to Feature Geometry
• Week 2/3: Phonological representation and assimilation of place
• Week 4: Assimilation of place and cue-driven phonotactics
• Week 5: Cue-driven phonotactics and 'postlexical' assimilation
• Week 6: Explaining vowel harmony (part 1)
• Week 7: Explaining vowel harmony (part 2)
• Week 8: Who is afraid of inventories?
• Week 9: Dispersion and quanta
• Week 10: Implementing functional constraints
• Credits

Week 1: Intro to Feature Geometry

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 129 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 144 kB, 4 slides per page)

Other WWW resources

• Peter Ladefoged's Vowels and Consonants website is a good resource for audio examples of labiovelar plosives and many other types of sounds

Week 2/3: Phonological representation and assimilation of place

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 409 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 416 kB, 4 slides per page)

WWW resources

• The unabridged feature classes in phonology, the paper by Padgett cited in the material posted above is available online at http://people.ucsc.edu/~padgett/papers.html

Week 4: Assimilation of place and cue-driven phonotactics

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 289 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 255 kB, 4 slides per page)

Speech acoustics resources

• PRAAT website
• Wavesurfer: another, somewhat simpler speech analyis program
• Speech Filing System (SFS): comprehensive speech analysis and synthesis package, created and maintained at the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics at University College London
• EMU: a speech database package.
• Audacity: an open source, general-purpose audio tool, useful for digitising long stretches of speech
• The Audio File Formats FAQ: lots of useful technical information about audio file formats
• Some useful LinguistList postings: 14-707 on field recording equipment; 14-79 (use of Minidisc recordings for acoustic analysis); 14-2229 (converting MP3 files)

Other WWW resources

• Jun's (2004) paper on the articulatory and perceptual underpinnings is available online via http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/PBP/JunAbstract.htm

Week 5: Cue-driven phonotactics and 'postlexical' assimilation

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 520 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 528 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Responses to the perception experiment conducted during lecture 4 (plain text, 752 bytes). This file contains the reponses for all 6 of you who were present during lecture 4. Cells in the table are separated by spaces

WWW resources

• Hamann's (2003) dissertation on retroflex sounds is available online via http://www.library.uu.nl/digiarchief/dip/diss/2003-0721-104256/inhoud.htm
• Steriade's (2001) paper on directional asymmetries is available from http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/bibliography/steriade.html
• Some of my writings on voicing assimilation are available from my research page.

Week 6: Explaining vowel harmony (part 1)

Material used in class

• Handout (PDF, 163 kB, 2 logical pages per physical page)

WWW resources

• Kaun's (1995) dissertation on vowel harmony is available online from the Rutgers Optimality Archive

Week 7: Explaining vowel harmony (part 2)

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 282 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 288 kB, 4 slides per page)

WWW resources

• The BAs are reading David Harrison's (1999) paper Vowel harmony and disharmony in Tuvan and Tofa. This paper, and more interesting stuff on Turkic VH is available from the author's website

Week 8: Who is afraid of inventories?

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 203 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 209 kB, 4 slides per page)

Week 9: Dispersion and quanta

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 291 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 294 kB, 4 slides per page)
• PRAAT script used to generate the articulatory synthesis material on slides 15 and 16 (plain text, 1.4 kB). To run this script, open it with Control - Open Praat script... in the Praat object window, and then select Run from the Run menu in the script editor. Click "OK" on the dialog box that pops up to inform you about the starting volume, and wait for the synthesis to finish (click "OK" again), which may take a while depending on your computer's CPU. Running the script will generate a number of objects. The most important of these are Speaker oracle and Artword fricative, which jointly represent the control parameters fed into the system, and Sound fricative_oracle, which represents the acoustic output. For more info on articulatory synthesis in PRAAT, see the relevant manual page (online version via this link).
• If you don't want to bother with all of the above, but are curious about the sound on slide 16, you can simply download and play the file behind this link (WAV, 35 kB)
• If you're interested in articulatory synthesis on the other hand, there's another PRAAT script to play with behind this link (plain text, 2 kB)

Week 10: Implementing functional constraints

Material used in class

• Slide presentation (PDF, 150 kB, 1 slide per page)
• Handout (PDF, 159 kB, 4 slides per page)

WWW resources

• The review of de Boer (2001) which I wrote for LinguistList back in 2002 is available via this link

Credits

The slide shows and handouts posted here were made with PDF(La)TeX (here as part of the MiKTeX distribution), using the foils class and other files provided by FoilTeX, the PPower4 postprocessor for some color/slide transition effects, and the pdfpages package for generating the 4-up handouts.

I used PRAAT and in some instances, R, Inkscape and Dia to prepare the diagrams. Where necessary SVG output from Inkscape was transcoded into PDF using the Batik SVG Toolkit, which is part of the Apache project.

Sound files were recorded and edited with PRAAT, and in some cases with Audacity. The video clips shown in class, finally, were edited with VirtualDub.