Dissertation

Smith, Brian W. (2015). Phonologically-Conditioned Allomorphy and UR Constraints. PhD Thesis, UMass Amherst.

Abstract: This dissertation provides a new model of the phonology-morphology interface, focusing on Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy (PCA). In this model, UR selection occurs during the phonological component, and mappings between meanings and URs are encoded as violable constraints, called UR constraints (Boersma 2001; Pater et al. 2012). Ranking UR constraints captures key generalizations about PCA, such as similarities between PCA and phonological alternations, the existence of defaults, and the interaction of PCA and phonological repairs (epenthesis, deletion, etc.). Since PCA follows from the ranking or weighting of constraints, patterns of PCA can be learned using existing learning algorithms, and modeling variation is PCA is straightforward in any constraint-based model of variation, such as Maximum Entropy Grammar (Goldwater & Johnson 2003).

Papers and manuscripts

Smith, Brian W. (2016/submitted). –(a)licious and –(a)thon: new morphemes obey pre-existing constraints. Ms, University of California Santa Cruz.

Smith, Brian W. (2013). –(a)licious: a new morpheme obeys existing constraints. Ms, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Superseded by paper above, but remains available for posterity.

Smith, Brian W. (2013). Evidence for weighted constraints: Epenthesis in French. Ms, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Smith, Brian W. (2013). Ineffability and UR constraints in Optimality Theory. Ms, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

McCarthy, John J., Kevin Mullin, and Brian W. Smith (2013). Implications of Harmonic Serialism for lexical tone association. In E. D. Botma and Roland Noske, eds., Phonological Architecture: Empirical, Theoretical and Conceptual Issues — Papers in Honour of Norval S.H. Smith. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (link is to earlier 2010 version)

Pater, Joe, Robert Staubs, Karen Jesney and Brian W. Smith (2012). Learning probabilities over underlying representations. In the Proceedings of the Twelfth Meeting of the ACL-SIGMORPHON: Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology.

Selected talks and posters

Smith, Brian W. (2017). Using language-wide phonotactics to learn affix-specific phonology. 
Paper presented at the LSA 2017 Annual Meeting, Austin, TX.

Smith, Brian W. and Claire Moore-Cantwell (2016). Emergent idiosyncrasy in English comparatives. Paper presented at the 47th Annual Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47).

Smith, Brian W. and Joe Pater (2016). French schwa in harmonic grammar. Paper presented at 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46), Stonybrook University, NY.

Smith, Brian W. (2015). A unified constraint-based account of the English indefinite article. Poster presented at the 23rd Annual Manchester Phonology Meeting Manchester, UK.

Smith, Brian W. (2013). -(i)licious: A case of product-oriented allomorphy. Poster presented at the 21st Annual Manchester Phonology Meeting Manchester, UK.

Smith, Brian W. (2012). Phonologically-conditioned ineffability and UR constraints in OT. Poster presented at the 20th Annual Manchester Phonology Meeting Manchester, UK.

Pater, Joe and Brian W. Smith (2011). Le ‘e’ en français: élision, épenthèse, les deux, ni l’un ni l’autre? Meeting on “Phonologie du Français Contemporain”, Paris, December 8th, 2011.