Postgr-Idiots Guide to OT · 3 Summary Further reading Danielle Marie Turton Postgr-Idiots Guide to OT. Introduction Criticisms of OT Summary References Thanks in …

IntroductionCriticisms of OT

SummaryReferences

Postgr-Idiots Guide to OT

Danielle Marie Turton

19th Dec 2012

Danielle Marie Turton Postgr-Idiots Guide to OT

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/danielle.turton



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1 IntroductionIntroductionConstraintsSome terminology

2 Criticisms of OTVariationOpacity

3 SummaryFurther reading




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Thanks in advance

The following materials have been borrowed from RicardoBermudez-Otero’s Phonological Theory course (LELA30092) atThe University of Manchester. Arto Anttila’s Variation in OTcourse at Stanford University has also been of use and is availablehere.


http://bermudez-otero.com

http://bermudez-otero.com

http://www.stanford.edu/~anttila/teaching/lsa-2007/ variation.html



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IntroductionConstraintsSome terminology

Introduction

Launched upon the linguistic scene in 1993, OptimalityTheory (OT) has since risen to become one of the mostdominant research paradigms in phonology.

OT offers new insights into the relationship betweenlanguage-particular phenomena and crosslinguistic typologicalgeneralisations, and, in so doing, enables phonological analysisto attain a new level of explanatory adequacy.

However, issues such as opacity and the phonetic grounding ofphonological constraints pose severe difficulties for OT.

In this session, I will introduce OTs basic concepts, logicalstructure as well as empirical applications.

We shall also explore the empirical and conceptual challengesthat OT currently faces.




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What is OT?

A general model of how grammars are structured. Prince & Smolensky (1993)propose the following approach to grammar:

There are no language-particular rules.

There is a single universal set of violable phonological constraints (CON);these constraints are present and active in all languages.

Different grammars differ solely in terms of the ranking of constraints.The set of possible constraint rankings defines the set of possiblegrammars.

For any underlying representation, there is a component of the grammar(GEN) that generates the set of all conceivable surface representations.

The constraint component (EVAL), picks the optimal surfacerepresentation from the set created by GEN. The optimal candidate isthe one which satisfies the highest ranked constraints.




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Managing constraints

UoM friends Keith, Corby, Joanne and Nancy are deciding whereto go for lunch.

Nancy is vegetarian.

Corby has left her megarider at home so wants to gosomewhere on campus.

Keith is sick of bumping into his undergrads.

Joanne would prefer to avoid the veggie cafe because herex-boyfriend works there.




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Taking the priority of constraints into consideration, the veggiecafe is the winner, as the constraint it violates has been assignedthe least priority.

input Veggie Walking *Undergrads *Ex boyf

a. + Veggie cafe ∗b. Kro steak day ∗!

c. Student Union ∗!

d. Bar burrito (in town) ∗!




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If the order of Joanne and Keith’s constraints were reversed, wewould get a different winner:

/input/ Veggie Walking *Ex boyf *Undergrads

a. Veggie cafe ∗!

b. Kro steak day ∗!

c. + Student Union ∗d. Barburrito (town) ∗!




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Notes on notational conventions

The ranking table is called a tableau.

The /input/ form is in the top left cell.

The constraints are in small caps.


a. Veggie cafe ∗!






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Double ruled lines separate the column and row headers.

The order in which the constraints appear reflect their priority,left to right.

If the constraints are equally weighted, they are separated bya dotted line.


a. Veggie cafe ∗!






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If the constraints are equally weighted, they are separated bya dotted line.

Input: // Veggie Walking *Undergrads *Ex boyf

a. Veggie cafe ∗b. Kro steak day ∗!

c. Student Union ∗d. Barburrito (in town) ∗!




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An asterisk ∗ means that form has violated the constraint.

∗! means that the form has fatally violated the constraint andcan’t win.

Cells are shaded grey when their status is no longer relevant(i.e. they can’t win).


a. Veggie cafe ∗!






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The hand + means that form has won.

The potential candidates appear below the input, labelled asa. , b. , c. etc.

The constraint ranking is written as Veggie options �Walking distance � *Ex boyf � *Undergrads


a. Veggie cafe ∗!






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Types of constraints

Con itself consists of two types of constraints: markedness andfaithfulness.




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Markedness Constraints

In short, well-formedness e.g. complex consonant clusters aremarked (similar to 70s style surface structure constraints)

How do we make decisions on what is more marked?

marked structures occur less frequently than unmarked ones inthe world’s languages

marked structures arise later during language acquisition;

marked structures tend to be lost through language change.




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Faithfulness Constraints

A significant innovation in OT, faithfulness constraints areinherently conservative. They require the output to resemblethe input.

If we only had markedness constraints, we’d just be saying paall the time.

e.g. Max I/O: every segment in the input must have acorresponding segment in the output i.e. no deletion.

e.g. Dep: Every output segment must have a correspondingsegment in the input i.e. no insertion.




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Example: English plurals

The plural in English has several phonological surfacerepresentations (SR) e.g. cat[s], dog[z], and fish[Iz]. It is widelyagreed that the underlying representation (UR) is /z/.

The Constraint Set

*SibSib: Don’t have two adjacent sibilantsMax: Don’t delete segmentsDep: Don’t insert segments

Agree(voice): Two adjacent segments must agree in voiceIdent(voice): The voicing in the output must be the same

as the voicing in the input




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Dogs

Input: /dog + z/ *SibSib Max Dep Agree(voice) Ident(voice)

a. dog

b. dogs

c. dogz

d. dogis

e. dogiz




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Dogs


a. dog ∗!

b. dogs ∗! ∗c. + dogz

d. dogis ∗! ∗e. dogiz ∗!




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Fishes

Input: /fIS + z/ *SibSib Max Dep Agree(voice) Ident(voice)

a. fIS ∗!

b. fISs ∗! ∗c. fISz ∗! ∗d. fISIs ∗ ∗!

e. + fISIz ∗




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Cats

Input: /k æt + z/ *SibSib Max Dep Agree(voice) Ident(voice)

a. kæt ∗!

b. + kæts ∗c. kætz ∗!

d. kætIs ∗! ∗e. kætIz ∗!




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Harmonic bounding

A constraint can never win if it’s harmonically bounded. Forexample, in the dogs tableau, output [dogIs] can never win as theviolations incurred by [dogIz] are a subset of the violations incurredby [dogIs]. A candidate does not need to be a winner toharmonically bound another.


a. dog ∗!

b. dogs ∗! ∗c. + dogz

d. dogis ∗! ∗e. dogiz ∗!




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Factorial Typology

The number of possible ranking is the number of constraintfactorial. In our example this would be: 5! = 120

i.e. all the possible rankings of *SibSib, Max, Dep,Agree(voice), Ident(voice).




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VariationOpacity

Variation

OT (and formal linguistics in general) is often criticised for notbeing able to handle variation.

Since the advent OT, linguists have been investigating ways tohandle variation within a constraint based framework.




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VariationOpacity

Example t/d-deletion

In English, the well-known phonological process oft/d-deletion variably deletes a t/d which is the final segmentof a complex coda e.g. best man becomes bes’ man.

t/d-deletion The process can occur before a consonant orvowel in the following word, or before a pause:

(a) It cost ∼ cos five pounds (/t/ before a consonant)(b) It cost ∼ cos us five pounds (/t/ before a vowel)(c) That’s how much it cost ∼ cos (/t/ before a pause)




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VariationOpacity

Coetzee 2004




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VariationOpacity

Sample ranking (Kiparsky 1993)




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VariationOpacity

Modelling variation in OT

One of the most successful attempts has been Stochastic OT(Boersma 1997) where constraints have ranges, rather thanfixed points.




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VariationOpacity

Canadian Raising and flapping

Flapping: An intervocalic /t/ becomes the voiced tap [R] (in alldialects of American English). Raising: the diphthongs /aI/ and

/aU/ raise to [5I] and [2U] before a voiceless consonant e.g. write,house.

BUT the writer, rider problem.




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VariationOpacity

Opacity

OT does not countenance serial rule application: how are opacityeffects to be accounted for?

Solution: Stratal OT?




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VariationOpacity

Stratal OT

In Stratal OT (Bermudez-Otero, 1999, 2007, 2011; Kiparsky2000) phonological processes apply cyclically over a hierarchyof stem-level, word-level, and phraselevel domains

Each domain is subject to its own stratum-specific OTgrammar.

The overapplication of Canadian Raising is due to the factthat Raising applies at a higher grammatical level thanFlapping.




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Further reading

The founding text of OT is Prince & Smolensky (1993),closely followed by McCarthy & Prince (1993).

Introductory overviews of the theory include Archangeli &Langendoen (1997), Kager (1999), and McCarthy (2002).

Of these, Archangeli & Langendoen (1997) is the mostelementary and McCarthy (2002) the most advanced.

Kager (1999) is good for a general overview. McCarthy (2002)contains extensive suggestions for further reading classified bytopic and a massive bibliography of more than 800 items.

In addition, McCarthy (2003) provides an introductoryanthology of readings in OT phonology.

A lot of unpublished material on OT can be accessed throughthe Rutgers Optimality Archive here: ROA.


http://roa.rutgers.edu



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References I

Archangeli, Diana, and D. Terence Langendoen. 1997. Afterword. InOptimality theory: An overview , eds. Diana Archangeli and D. TerenceLangendoen, 200–215. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bermudez-Otero, Ricardo. 2007. Diachronic phonology. In The Cambridgehandbook of phonology , ed. Paul de Lacy, 497–517. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Bermudez-Otero, Ricardo. 2011. Cyclicity. In The Blackwell companion tophonology , eds. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, andKeren Rice, Vol. 4, 2019–2048. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Boersma, Paul. 1997. How we learn variation, optionality, and probability.Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University ofAmsterdam 21:43–58.

Coetzee, Andries. 2004. What it means to be a loser: non-optimal candidatesin optimality theory. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts,Amherst.

Kager, Rene. 1999. Optimality theory . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.




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References II

Kiparsky, Paul. 1993. Blocking in nonderived environments. In Studies inlexical phonology , eds. Sharon Hargus and Ellen M. Kaisse, Phonetics andPhonology 4, 277–313. San Diego: Academic Press.

Kiparsky, Paul. 2000. Analogy as optimization: ‘exceptions’ to Sievers’ Law inGothic. In Analogy, levelling, markedness: principles of change in phonologyand morphology , ed. Aditi Lahiri, 15–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

McCarthy, John. 1993. Containment, consistency, and alignment. In RutgersOptimality Workshop I . New Brunswick, NJ.

McCarthy, John J. 2002. Comparative markedness [long version]. In Papers inoptimality theory ii , eds. Angela C. Carpenter, Andries W. Coetzee, andPaul de Lacy, University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics26, 171–246. Amherst, MA: GLSA, University of Masssachusetts.

Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality Theory: constraintinteraction in generative grammar. Technical Report RuCCS-TR-2, RutgersUniversity Center for Cognitive Science.



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Postgr-Idiots Guide to OT · 3 Summary Further reading Danielle Marie Turton Postgr-Idiots Guide to OT. Introduction Criticisms of OT Summary References Thanks in …