Bruce Hayes                 Bruce P. Hayes                      

Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus

Dept. of Linguistics
UCLA
Los Angeles CA 90095-1543

Image of my email address


Talk handout:  Liang, Mateu, and Hayes, An experimental study of Catalan consonant alternations, for the 2024 Annual Meeting on Phonology at Rutgers University.


Office hours:  by appointment, please send me an email.

My office is 2101G Campbell Hall. I can also Zoom with you with advance notice.

This site is still being assembled.  (I'm moving my old site off a server at UCLA.) If you are looking for something here but cannot find it, please email me and I will post it for you.

I retired in June 2023. At present, I come into the department most days. I work on two parts of my old job that I particularly enjoyed, collaborative research and grad student advising. 


Teaching

I'm probably done with classroom teaching, but here are links to web sites for courses I taught during my career. Teachers feel free to use anything, and the research seminars (numbered 251) might be useful as orientation.

Textbooks

Research/Downloadable Papers

Current collaborations

Currently active projects: (a) modeling how infants learn English suffixes without knowing English; with Canaan Breiss, Megha Sundara, and Mark Johnson. (b) learning underlying representations, w(2024)ith a blend of math and phonological theory; with Yang Wang. (c) Simultaneous learning of syntax and phrasally-active phonological constraints, with Tim Hunter and Canaan Breiss. (d) A textbook on MaxEnt grammars, with Claire Moore-Cantwell; (f) A MaxEnt analysis of the meter of Beowulf; with Donka Minkova; (g) A wug-test study of the consonant phonology of Catalan, with Kevin Liang and Victoria Mateu.

General summary of my research approach

In our current research, my collaborators and I approach a single phenomenon with three methods in parallel: (i) data analysis in the classical tradition of generative grammar, using rules and constraints; (ii) experimentation, to assess productivity and generality of phonological knowledge, (iii) modeling: machine-implemented algorithms, incorporating elements of phonological theory, learn the grammar through examination of a data corpus. The idea is to study not just the data pattern of the language, but to determine more precisely what the native speaker knows and demonstrate through modeling how she might come to know it. These goals have always been central to generative linguistics; advances in both theory and technology now help us address them more directly.

On the more formal side, I'm involved in efforts to assess models of variation in language by looking at mathematical properties of the patterns they generate. To my knowledge, these patterns represent a (possible) class of linguistic universals not previously studied. In the papers listed below, see Hayes ((2022), Zuraw and Hayes (2017),  and Hayes (2017).

I also work from time to time on the analysis of poetic meter, where many of the tools of formal phonology have proven helpful.  Here is a brief summary of this work.

My CV can be accessed here.

Books

Articles


Talk handouts and slides

Handouts whose content is in the papers listed above are mostly not included here.  Some of these talks you can watch as web-posted video.

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Software

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Links

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