| ROA: | 204 |
|---|---|
| Title: | What Constraints Should OT Allow? |
| Authors: | Jason Eisner |
| Comment: | 20 pp. Talk handout from LSA 1997. (9 Jan 1997) |
| Length: | 20 |
| Abstract: | What Constraints Should OT Allow? Jason Eisner - University of Pennsylvania jeisner@linc.cis.upenn.edu January 9, 1997 (corrected version) Handout for talk at LSA Annual Meeting, Chicago, 1/4/97. Optimality Theory (OT) has shown itself to be an elegant framework for phonological description. Two important questions remain to be settled, however: What constraints are allowed? And what kind of representations do they constrain? Formalizing what OT can and cannot say is part of stating UG. This talk proposes an approach to constraining OT, called "primitive Optimality Theory" (OTP). Most constraints given in the literature can be reformulated (not always obviously) as coming from one of two simple, local families of ``primitive constraints'': Alignment (licensing): Each a temporally overlaps some b. (If not, it incurs one violation mark.) Disalignment (clash): Each a temporally overlaps no b. (Each overlap incurs one violation mark.) Here, a and b may be constituents, edges of constituents, or restricted kinds of conjunctive or disjunctive configurations. We formalize these families and the representations that they constrain. As in Optimal Domains Theory, neither the constraints nor the representations use association lines. The constraints control only the relative timing of articulatory gestures, and other phonological or morphological constituents, along a continuous timeline. A list of hundreds of constraints drawn from the literature is presented, showing how every degree of freedom of OTP is exploited in each of several areas: features, prosody, feature-prosody interaction, input-output relationships, and morphophonology. To show that the primitive constraints are not merely necessary, but also close to sufficient, we also discuss how to handle a few apparently difficult cases of non-local phenomena. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |