Eric Baković

I’m most interested in phonological theory, which aims to formally characterize the set of possible human language sound patterns — and, in principle, only that set. Some of my most recent (and mainly collaborative) work questions claims about the outer limit of the set of possible phonological patterns (McCollum, Baković, Mai, & Meinhardt, 2020; Meinhardt, Mai, Baković, & McCollum, 2024), investigates the typological predictions made by specific constraint-based optimization systems (Mai & Baković, 2020, Baković & Mai 2021, Baković & Bennett, 2023), defines a formal typology of process interactions and their relations to one another (Baković & Blumenfeld, 2019; Baković & Blumenfeld, 2024), and presents an unsupervised approach to learning human-readable descriptions of phonological processes from collections of related utterances (Barke, Kunkel, Polikarpova, Meinhardt, Baković, & Bergen, 2019). This latter work represents work funded by NSF BCS Award #2021149.

• Baković, Eric, and Lev Blumenfeld. “Process interactions.” In Adam Jardine and Paul de Lacy (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, under review. [manuscript]

• Baković, Eric, and Lev Blumenfeld. 2024. “A formal typology of process interactions.” Phonological Data and Analysis 6.3. doi:10.3765/pda.v6art3.83 [OA article] [lingbuzz/006861] [alternative copy]

• Meinhardt, Eric, Anna Mai, Eric Baković, and Adam G. McCollum. 2024. “Weak determinism and the computational consequences of interaction.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. doi:10.1007/s11049-023-09578-1 [OA article] [enhanced pdf] [lingbuzz/006712] [alternative copy]

• Baković, Eric, and Wm. G. Bennett. 2023. "Faithfulness and underspecification." Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2022). doi:10.3765/amp.v10i0.5456 [OA article] [lingbuzz/007074] [postprint]

… see a complete list of my works here.