| ROA: | 435 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The OCP in the perception grammar |
| Authors: | Paul Boersma |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 52 |
| Abstract: | The OCP in the perception grammar Paul Boersma University of Amsterdam This article centres on the role of the perceptual recoverability of economical representations in the evaluation of faithfulness constraints in the production grammar, focussing on phenomena that have been traditionally described as OCP effects, while noting that these OCP effects are special cases of a more general process of sequential perceptual integration. In passing, we note that a grammar model that wants to incorporate functional principles into phonology and still maintain economical representations in the lexicon, has to consist of three different grammars for production, perception, and recognition. Summarizing the conclusions of the consecutive chapters, the reasoning goes as follows: 1. The phonological surface form involved in the evaluation of faithfulness constraints in an Optimality-Theoretic production grammar is best modelled as an economical lexical-like representation constructed from the acoustic signal by a language-dependent process of perception. 2. This perception process maps raw sensory data onto discrete structures. 3. 'Perception grammar' is an appropriate term for this perception process, because this process submits to grammatical modelling and both of its tasks (categorization, sequential abstraction) are language-dependent. 4. The perception grammar is best modelled as an Optimality-Theoretic grammar, because there are conflicts within and between its various tasks (categorization, sequential abstraction), and because the autosegmental well-formedness conditions that handle sequential abstraction (OCP and LCC) must be regarded as violable if they are defined in terms of intervening material. 5. When combined with a recognition grammar and a production grammar, the existence of a perception grammar that handles categorization and sequential abstraction ensures compatibility between lexical economy and phonetically-based ranking of articulatory and faithfulness constraints. 6. The OCP in the perception grammar turns out to handle the linguistic data well. Faithfulness comes to replace correspondence, uniformity, anchoring, and alignment. Moreover, expressing the OCP as a violable constraint in an Optimality-Theoretic production grammar runs into the problem that faithfulness constraints can force different phonological surface representations for phonetically identical forms, whereas expressing the OCP as a violable constraint in an Optimality-Theoretic perception grammar does not run into this problem. These points are evidence for the existence of a perception grammar and suggest that the natural place for constraints that handle sequential abstraction, i.e. OCP and LCC, is in this perception grammar. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |