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CV
The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by
doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.
-- Pierre Abelard
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Betsy McCall
This page is primarily for links to papers that have been
completed and published, and to catalogue past research interests, in case
anyone cares. For additional information on conferences I've been at
but for which no proceedings volumes were available, please see the
CV.
Metathesis,
Deletion, Dissimilation and Consonant Ordering in Proto-Greek.
Proceedings of the 11th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. (2000)
This paper discusses how various developments and synchronic
alternations in Ancient Greek can be traced to a single underlying
principle, a principle rooted in jaw movement within a stop-stop consonant
cluster. The different behaviours result from the interaction of this
principle with another constraint operating in Greek: faithfulness of place
features within a root. While the analysis is consistent with
Optimality Theory, the specific analysis along these lines is omitted here.
This paper joins together well-accepted accounts of the historical
development of Greek, as well as accounting for some linguistically that had
previously been seen as analogical developments. The paper linked here
needs a Greek font and a phonetic font, and is in Word format.
Decision Theoretic Models of Optimality. Proceedings of the
Workshop on Variation within Optimality Theory. (2003)
This paper has been extracted from a small portion of my
masters thesis linked on another page. Here I discuss four different
variations within Optimality Theory and couch them in mathematical terms as
utility functions. These models are then compared and the implications
for linguistic theory are discussed. The four variations of Optimality
Theory discussed are a strict, stripped down version; one that permits tied
constraints; one that permits multiple violations, and a stochastic model.
We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each version. This one is
in .pdf.
More as they are available.
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