Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Shigeto Kawahara
1 General Introduction
The following discussion is based on my seminar that I taught at the University of Georgia in Spring 2007, itself being inspired by my graduate education at UMass, Amherst. It lays out how I have been trying to nd research topics. Before moving on: (1) Building your publication prole during your graduate years is a key to success. (2) Qualifying papers (or generals papers) should NOT be your goals. You should think about presenting and/or publishing them.1 (3) Try to get one journal publication out before you go on a job market. Practice dealing with reviews with your advisor, because they know how. It would be extremely stressful to do so alone, and you might as well have a practice with an expert. (4) Present at conferences, build your social network, and build your CV with conference proceedings papers. (5) Find a good t for your good projects: try to evaluate the quality of your work objectively. You dont alway need to produce top-notch work. If you nd something interesting to say about a particular language, and if that idea is not ground-shaking for the whole linguistic community, there are smaller conferences with more focused interests. Dont undermine the value of your work, but think about how to get the best out of your ideas. (6) With that said, going to too many conferences is time consuming and exhausting. Journal publications are ultimately more important than conference proceedings papers.
2 Theory
2.1 Propose a fundamentally new theory
Proposing an entirely new theory, say, something like Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004) or Autosegmental Theory (Goldsmith, 1976). It may be risky to try to do this in a short paper. You may try in your dissertation if you like...
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good foundation for future work. Examples: Kurisus Morpheme-Real constraint (Kurisu, 2001).
3.4 Taking theory really seriously and test its phonetic consequence
What does your theory predict about actual phonetic implementation? Can you test it? (Broselow, Chen, & Huffman, 1997; Kawahara & Shinya, 2008; Maddieson, 1993)
4 General Tips
4.1 Talk to your friends and advisors
I come up with research topics most often when I talk to my friends and advisors.
References
Bakovic, E. (2000). Harmony, dominance, and control. Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University. Broselow, E., Chen, S.-I., & Huffman, M.(1997). Syllable weight: Convergence of phonology and phonetics. Phonology, 14, 47-82. Flemming, E. (2005). Deriving natural classes in phonology. Lingua, 115, 287-309. Goldsmith, J.(1976). Autosegmental phonology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. (Published by Garland Press, New York , 1979) Hayes, B., Kirchner, R., & Steriade, D. (2004). Phonetically based phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ((eds.)) Kawahara, S., Ono, H., & Sudo, K. (2006). Consonant co-occurrence restrictions in Yamato Japanese. In T. Vance & K. Jones (Eds.), Japanese/Korean linguistics 14 (Vol. 14, p. 27-38). Stanford: CSLI. Kawahara, S., & Shinya, T. (2008). The intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese: Evidence for intonational phrase and utterance. Phonetica, 65(1-2), 62-105. Kiparsky, P.(2002). Syllables and moras in Arabic. In C. F ry & R. v. d. Vijver (Eds.), The optimal e syllable. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kr mer, M. (2003). Vowel harmony and correspondence theory. Berlin and New York: Mouton a de Gruyter. Kurisu, K. (2001). The phonology of morpheme realization. Doctoral dissertation, University of Santa Cruz. Liberman, M., & Prince, A.(1977). On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 249-336. Maddieson, I. (1993). Splitting the mora. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 83, 9-18. McCarthy, J. J. (1999). Sympathy and phonological opacity. Phonology, 16, 331-399. McCarthy, J. J. (2003). OT constraints are categorical. Phonology, 20(1), 75-138. McCarthy, J. J. (2007). Hidden generalizations: Phonological opacity in Optimality Theory. London: Equinox Publishing. McCarthy, J. J. (2008). Doing Optimality Theory. Oxford: Blackwell-Weiley. Padgett, J.(2002). On the characterization of feature classes in phonology. Language, 78.1, 81-110. Prince, A. (1983). Relating to the grid. Linguistic Inquiry, 14(1), 19-100. Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (1993/2004). Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. 4
Wilson, C. (2000). Targeted constraints: An approach to contextual neutralization in Optimality Theory. Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.