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E-mail:
Office:
Phone: (413) 545-6830
Fax: (413) 545-2792
For general information about me, stay
here.
For information about my teaching and
advising, go here.
Course web pages are available to
registered students on Spark.
For information about my publications,
go here.
For my CV, go here.
The Latest
My paper “The serial interaction of stress and syncope” is in press at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
My textbook Doing
Optimality Theory is now available.
The
I work in phonological theory and allied fields. My recent research deals
with a range of issues arising in and around Optimality Theory, such as the nature
of markedness constraints, the difference between gradience
and categoricality, phonological opacity, and the
role of morphological paradigms in phonology. In the past, I've published
articles on topics like the phonetics and phonology of pharyngeal consonants in
Semitic, vowel harmony in northwestern
I first learned about Optimality Theory from its creators, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky. Alan is also my long-time collaborator, pre- and post-OT, on the theory of Prosodic Morphology. The theory of Prosodic Morphology is an attempt to give independent, general explanations for the properties of reduplication, root-and-pattern morphology, and other phenomena at the interface between phonology and morphology. Optimality Theory is a general theory of constraint interaction, with applications to many areas of linguistics but with particular relevance to Prosodic Morphology. See my research and publications page for more information.
My teaching activities include the full range of graduate and undergraduate courses in phonology as well as Linguistics 101 a large introductory lecture course. (Most recent enrollment: 330.) I recently completed a textbook, Doing Optimality Theory, which Blackwell is publishing. Like my colleagues, I spend a great deal of time working one-on-one with graduate students. See my teaching page for information about students I've supervised in the past.
Personal
Born Medford, Massachusetts, 1953. Native speaker of the
The ShahR accords with his view vs. The Shah Records
Radio Tehran. Say
"saTin" now. vs. Say
"SaTurn" now.
Education
A.B. 1975,
Ph.D. 1979, MIT, linguistics.
Professional
Taught at UT
Joined UMass Amherst faculty in 1985. Professor since 1989, department head 1993-96.
Taught at 1987, 1991, and 1997 LSA Summer Institutes.
Consultant (1984-1986) at Department of Linguistics and AI Research, AT&T
Bell Laboratories
Honors and Awards
Distinguished University Professor, 2007.
Fellow,
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1992-93.
Chancellor’s Medal and
Distinguished Faculty Lecture, 2004.
Outstanding Teacher Award,
President of Arabic Linguistics Society, 1989-90.
Lansdowne Visiting Scholar,
Faculty Fellowship, UMass Amherst, 1997.
Editorial Boards:
Phonology
Linguistic
Inquiry
Phonology
Editor for Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (first and
second editions).
Last revised April 10, 2008.