| ROA: | 63 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Deriving variation from grammar: A study of Finnish genitives |
| Authors: | Arto Anttila |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 28 |
| Abstract: | Deriving variation from grammar ROA-63 variation.ps Arto Anttila Stanford University The claim is that variation, including probabilities, can be derived from an optimality-theoretic grammar. Two specific questions are discussed: (i) The locus of variation: Why are only certain forms susceptible to variation? (ii) Degrees of variation: Why is one variant preferred over the other? The empirical data comes from Finnish morphology. Polysyllabic stems such as /naapuri/ 'neighbor' have multiple genitive plurals such as /naapurien/ and /naapureiden/ which are clearly distinct but phonologically related. The variation is systematic and productive and extends to recent loans and foreign names. Based on a 1.3 million word on-line corpus, I show that categorical outputs, variable outputs and statistical preferences follow from syllable prominence defined as a combination of stress, weight and sonority. The key idea is that the grammar is a partial order. The number of tableaux by which a variant wins predicts its probability of occurrence. In the categorical cases, the grammar converges on a single winner, i.e. one and the same candidate wins in all the tableaux compatible with the partial order. Variation arises if the partial order is too weak to select a unique winner. Statistical preferences arise if the grammar biases the numerical result in favor of some candidate. -- Hard copies are available upon request to anttila@csli.stanford.edu. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |