Dr. Kyle Gorman, assistant professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, the director of the master’s program in computational linguistics

What are phonotactic constraints good for? Abstract: Phonotactic constraints are key elements of many phonotactic theories. In Optimality Theory and related theories, for instance, these constraints are separate theoretical objects from the phonological processes they trigger. Some phonologists often go even further, positing the existence of phonotactic constraints which do not trigger any phonological processes in the given language, but whose existence can be inferred from distributional analysis, lexical statistics, phonotactic gaps, wordlikeness judgments of nonce words, and so on. I argue that phonotactic constraints so inferred are dubious, both theoretically and empirically, and the theory of phonotactics should instead focus on whatever generalizations are “good for” generating the input-output mappings phonological grammars are responsible for.

Zoom event: https://msu.zoom.us/j/91929271197

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