| ROA: | 464 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Tense-Lax Distinction in English Vowels and the Role of Parochial and Analogical Constraints |
| Authors: | Antony D. Green |
| Comment: | Appears in Linguistics in Potsdam 16 (2001), 32-57 |
| Length: | 12 |
| Abstract: | The vast majority of the work that has been done in Optimality Theory has focused, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, on the interaction between markedness (or well-formedness) constraints and faithfulness constraints. In this paper I investigate a particular kind of lexical exception, namely cases where phonotactic well- formedness is regularly violated by certain vowel + consonant sequences in most words (including the most common ones), while it is obeyed only in a handful of rare (mostly foreign) words. The focus of discussion is the distribution of tense and lax vowels in Eastern General American English: There are several environments (stressed open final syllables, position before certain consonants and consonant clusters) where the two types of vowel are in near-complementary distribution, but there are a few lexical exceptions among non-low vowels as well as regular violations of the phonotactics among low vowels. In recent loanwords, there are exceptions to these regular violations; in other words, the phonotactically expected pattern is found only in foreign words but not in native words. I argue that these exceptions to well-formedness are attributable to the influence of a network of connections between lexical items, concretely represented in the theory as a web of conjoined output-output (OO) correspondence constraints known as analogical constraints (Myers 1999). More isolated lexical exceptions are attributed to the influence of morpheme-specific parochial constraints. The role that analogical constraints and parochial constraints play in this analysis demonstrates an important consequence for Optimality Theory: There is more to phonology than just the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints, since constraints can also encourage the proliferation of a phonologically marked pattern, and can also require specific lexical items to have a certain phonological shape. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | Phonology |
| Article: | Version 1 |