About the project

[SPOT Webapp] · [SPOT codebase]

Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT) is a collaborative research project in the linguistics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which aims to develop new tools for rigorously investigating the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure. As of fall 2018, this work is funded by the National Science Foundation 1749368.

The group has developed an application which performs automatic candidate generation and constraint evaluation over prosodic parses for work in the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory. Various constraints from the literature on Match Theory and the Align/Wrap approach to prosodic phrasing have already been implemented.

The SPOT application is designed for use in conjunction with OTWorkplace, a tool for manipulating OT tableaux, determining rankings, and calculating factorial typologies.

The SPOT group includes professors Junko Ito and Armin Mester, along with the application’s developers Jenny Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, and Ozan Bellik.

The SPOT interface is available here, and all SPOT code is accessible on Github.