Advanced Phonology
MIT OpenCourseWare's graduate linguistics course examines phonological phenomena tied to morphological structure, including base-reduplicant identity, cyclicity, level ordering, derived environment effects, opaque rule interactions, and morpheme structure constraints. The course tests a claim from recent Optimality Theory literature that all these phenomena reduce to a single device, correspondence constraints, which regulate similarity between lexically related forms such as input and output, or base and reduplicant. Materials include readings drawn from current OT literature, problem sets applying correspondence theory to real language data, and class discussion notes. The course is aimed at students who already have grounding in phonological theory and want to work through how morphology-sensitive patterns are formalized. As with other MIT OCW offerings, all lecture notes and assignments are freely available online with no certificate attached.