The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay welcomes you to the Institute Diamond Jubilee Workshop in Linguistics – Optimality.

Abstract:
Optimality Theory (OT) is one of the most recent developments, primarily, in the study of phonology, but expanded to other branches of linguistics as well. It offers a significantly different approach to the analyses of natural language phenomena, be it phonological, morphological or syntactic in nature. In last two decades, OT hasbeen extensively used by linguists, who have applied it to discuss various aspects of language, and refined the theory itself to a great extent. This workshop aims to give the participants an overview of Optimality Theory and its application in some Indian (and other) languages.

DAY 1: Session 1 - 11/06/2019 - 9.30 AM onwards, Exploring Optimality Theory  1
DAY 1: Session 2 /Seminar  11/06/2019- 3.00PM  Hadoti reduplications: Effects of the sonority scale  

Abstract
       Reduplication, despite being primarily a morphological process, has some features that might be of interest for the phonologists. Sonority is one such prosodic feature which plays a vital role in the reduplication process in many languages. In general, the reduplication process in Hadoti (a regional variety of the Rajasthani) is highly productive, both morphologically and phonologically. Sonority, apart from other phonological impetuses, motivates the pattern of reduplication in Hadoti. In this study, the optimality theoretic (OT) approach is used to analyse the phonological patterning of the reduplication process in this regional variety. This study attempts to give a theoretical account of OT analysis of the reduplication process, and to understand the role of sonority (scale) in the entire process by drawing instances from Hadoti.

DAY 2: Session 1 12/06/2019 - 9.30 am onwards   Exploring Optimality Theory 2
DAY 2: Session 2 12/06/2019 - 3 pm onwards Discussion of work, problem solving (For workshop participants only.)

Conducted by: Prof. Somdev Kar, IIT Ropar and V. Sarma, IIT Bombay

About Dr. Kar
 Dr. Somdev Kar is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Kar received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hyderabad, and BA with honours in Linguistics from University of Calcutta. He worked at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, as a research associate, before his tenure as a ‘Fellow’ at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore. Dr. Kar conducted his post-doctoral research on four Tibeto-Burman languages of Sikkim during 2018-2010. Prior to joining IIT Ropar as a faculty member, he worked as a visiting faculty at Qatar University, Doha. His research interests lie in the fields of Phonetics, Phonology (Optimality Theory), Distributed Morphology, Forensic Linguistics, and NLP. 

Note: Please contact  tonialvares@gmail.com or neha.mourya08@gmail.com for any questions.