ALAN PRINCE VISITS

Last week Alan Prince returned to UCSC, the campus where Optimality Theory was first seriously launched in 1991 in a course given at the LSA Summer Institute. Besides guesting in Phonology B and meeting with graduate students and faculty, Alan was was here principally to introduce interested linguists to OT Workplace, a nifty Excel-based tool for checking the soundness of one’s OT analyses, studying their logic and internal consistency, as well as the factorial typology they bring with them. He also apparently had lots of fun and enjoyed his meetings with faculty and graduate students.