Old World Conference in Phonology 4

Outi Bat-El is professor of Linguistics at Tel-Aviv University. She received her BA in Linguistics from Tel-Aviv University in 1983 and her M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Her dissertation is on “Phonology and Word Structure in Modern Hebrew”. Her main research interests are phonology and morphology, with emphasis on prosodic morphology. The empirical basis of her study is mainly Modern Hebrew, which serves her research on Semitic as well as non-Semitic phenomena. She is currently involved in a child language project, which studies the phonology and morphology of Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking children (with typical and atypical development), from the first word up to the inflectional paradigms. Most of her current work takes an Optimality Theory perspective. She has published extensively in international journals and book volumes. Some representative papers of hers are the following: “Remarks on tier conflation”, Linguistic Inquiry 19:477-484 (1988), “Stem modification and cluster transfer in Modern Hebrew”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 12:571-593 (1994), “Competing principles of in paradigm uniformity: Evidence from Hebrew imperative paradigm”, In L.J. Downing, T.A. Hall, and R. Raffelsiefen (eds) Paradigms in Phonological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 44-64 (2005), “A gap in the feminine paradigm of Hebrew: A consequence of identity avoidance in the suffix domain”, In Curt Rice (ed.) When Nothing Wins: Modeling Ungrammaticality in OT. London: Equinox (to appear).

Junko Ito (University of California, Santa Cruz)
http://people.ucsc.edu/~ito/

Junko Ito, currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, received her Ph.D. from UMass, Amherst in 1986. She is Associate Editor for Natural Language and Linguistics Theory. Since her dissertation work (Syllable Theory in Prosodic Phonology, published in 1988 by Garland, "A Prosodic Theory of Epenthesis," NLLT 7, 1989), which dealt with the principles of syllabification and their interaction with phonological and morphological processes and developed a prosodic theory of the syllable (coda condition, prosodic licensing, etc.), her research has been concerned with constraint-based phonological theory--in recent years, more specifically with an optimality-theoretic model of phonology. One empirical focus of her work has been the morphophonemics and prosody of Japanese, such as the role of the minimal prosodic word in productive word formation processes (abbreviations and truncations, language game patterns), and the phonological form of compound structures and what it implies for our understanding of the prosodic hierarchy. A secondary line of investigation concerns the structure of the phonological lexicon and its implications for the theory of grammar and loanword phonology. Languages analyzed in some detail in her work include Japanese, Ainu, German, and Danish. Selected publications include (with Armin Mester): "The Structure of the Phonological Lexicon", in N. Tsujimura ed. The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers (1999), Japanese Morphophonemics, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series 41, MIT Press (2003).

Armin Mester (University of California, Santa Cruz)
http://people.ucsc.edu/~mester/

Armin Mester received his Ph.D. in 1986 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-editor of the book series Advances in Optimality Theory (Equinox Publications). His research is concerned with the principles that underlie the prosodic organization of human language, as manifested in syllabification, stress, and accent, as well as in the canonical prosodic forms and other templates encountered in word formation processes. His work on Latin prosody showed that the basic rhythmic unit of the language, the bimoraic trochee, not only determines word stress, but has a host of direct and indirect consequences throughout the morphological system, determining the shapes of affixes and their distribution, etc. A second line of research concerns phonological features: the proper understanding of contrastiveness and redundancy, and the cooccurrence restrictions subsumed under the Obligatory Contour Principle. His analytical work, which includes studies of Classical Latin, German and Japanese phonology and prosodic morphology, also gave rise to an investigation of the way the phonological lexicon of a language is organized into strata, and what this organization tells us about phonological theory itself. He is pursuing this work in the context of Optimality Theory, with an additional interest in the basic architecture of the theory (parallelism, opacity). Representative publications include: "The Quantitative Trochee in Latin," NLLT 12, 1994; "On the sources of opacity in OT: coda processes in German" [with J. Ito], in Fery and v.d. Vijver, eds. The Syllable in Optimality Theory, CUP, 2003; Japanese Morphophonemics [with J. Ito], MIT Press, 2003.

Moira Yip (University College London)
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/moira/home.htm

Professor Moira Yip is a theoretical linguist working in the area of phonology, with a special interest in Chinese. In addition to more than sixty papers in academic journals, she has published two books on tonal languages, the most recent of which Tone (Cambridge University Press, 2002) was reprinted by Peking University Press. She received her B.A. at Cambridge University, and her Ph.D. at M.I.T., and then taught in the United States for nearly twenty years, where she served as Acting Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She returned to the U.K. in 1998. She is co-director of the Centre for Human Communication at UCL She sits on the editorial boards of five journals, and the postgraduate panel for Modern Languages and Linguistics of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She is also on the Board of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics. She is UCL’s Pro-Provost for China, Hong Kong and Macao.

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