| ROA: | 46 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Optimality Theoretic Rankings with Tied Constraints: Slavic Relatives, Resumptive Pronouns and Learnability |
| Authors: | Kevin Broihier |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 64 |
| Abstract: | Optimality Theoretic Rankings with Tied Constraints: Slavic Relatives, Resumptive Pronouns and Learnability ROA-46 slavrc.ps, --.rtf Kevin Broihier kevin@psyche.mit.edu MIT, February 1995 Using the formal machinery of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), Pesetsky (cf. his submission to the Rutgers archive) analyzes and explains the the conditions under which syntactic elements that interact with the CP systems of French and English receive overt phonological realization. This paper extends Pesetsky's results in two ways. First, I argue that the constraint set and augmented OT apparatus that Pesetsky develops combine, almost directly, to yield an account of an interesting interaction in Polish relative clauses between the morphologically invariant element 'co' and a set of elements that I'll analyze as resumptive pronouns. Given this analysis of Polish, a number of properties of Russian relative clauses also fall out of the typology inherent in Pesetsky's system. Second, I address a gap in the theory of the learnability of OT systems that Pesetsky's addition of the notion of ties creates. From his analysis of English and French syntax, Pesetsky provides an argument for relaxing the requirement that all constraints in his system be ordered in a strict dominance hierarchy. He also provides a procedure for computing the optimal candidates in tableaux with tied constraints. The only explicitly proposed general algorithm for acquiring language-specific orderings of universal OT constraints (Tesar & Smolensky, 1993), however, is not equipped to deal with target languages that require tied constraints. Since, my analysis, like Pesetsky's, requires tied constraints, I consider several possible extensions of the Tesar and Smolensky algorithm that will handle these cases. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |