Nathan Sanders

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Williams College

Courses

Spring 2009
LING 210: Articulatory and Acoustic Phonetics
LING 220: The Syntactic Structure of English

Fall 2009
LING 230: Introduction to Logic and Semantics
LING 310: Phonology

January 2010
LING 010: Linguistic Typology and the Science of Constructed Languages

Spring 2010
LING 220: The Syntactic Structure of English
LING 340: Historical Linguistics

Other courses:
LING 100: Introduction to Linguistics
LING 400: Linguistics Research Seminar

Research Interests

My research interests center around phonology, a branch of linguistics. Specifically, I am interested in formal phonological theory; the interface between phonetics and phonology, such as the phonological role of acoustics and articulation; contrast loss and preservation; naturalness; derivational opacity; ludlings (language games, like Pig Latin); Polish and Slavic phonology; historical phonology (sound change); the interface between morphology and phonology; and computer models of phonological and phonetic phenomena.

Education

SB in Mathematics, minor in Linguistics, MIT (1996)
MA and PhD in Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz (2000, 2003)

Selected Research

2009. (With Jaye Padgett) Exploring the role of production in predicting vowel inventories. Talk given at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. [ PDF (corrected handout) ]

2009. (With Jacob Cerny and Christopher Paci) Towards a classification of the northern Berkshires dialect of American English. Poster presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. [ PDF ]

2008. (With Jaye Padgett) Articulatory parameters in a dispersion-focalization model of vowel systems. Talk given at the UC Santa Cruz Linguistics Alumni Conference. [ PDF (handout) ]

2008. (With Jaye Padgett) Predicting vowel inventories from a dispersion-focalization model: New results. Papers from the 44th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. [ PDF ]

2006. Strong lexicon optimization. Talk given at Umass Phonology Group. [ PDF (handout) ]

2004. Opacity from contrast: Neutral segments in harmony systems. Talk given at the 12th Manchester Phonology Meeting, University of Manchester. [ PDF (handout) ]

2003. Opacity and sound change in the Polish lexicon. PhD dissertation, UCSC. [ abstract ] [ PDF (defense handout) ] [ PDF ]

2002. Dispersion in OT: Color contrast in Middle Polish nasal vowels. WCCFL 21 Proceedings. 415-428. [ PDF ]

2001. Preserving synchronic parallelism: Diachrony and opacity in Polish. CLS 37: The Main Session. Papers from the 37th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. 501-516. [ PDF ]

2000. Intra-representational correspondence and the realization of empty morphemes. Qualifying exam paper, UCSC. [ PDF ]

1999. Same-edge alignment with opposite-edge effects. Talk given at WCCFL 18. [ PDF (handout) ]

1999. Intra-representational correspondence and truncation. Paper given at Linguistics at Santa Cruz. [ PDF ]

1999. (With Kazutaka Kurisu) Infixal nominal reduplication in Mangarayi. Phonology at Santa Cruz 6. 47-56. [ PDF ]

Hobbies

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