| ROA: | 818 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Insufficiency of Paper-and-Pencil Linguistics: the Case of Finnish Prosody |
| Authors: | Lauri Karttunen |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 13 |
| Abstract: | This paper implements two closely related ot analyses of Finnish prosody by Nine Elenbaas (1999) and Paul Kiparsky (2003). In general, Finnish prosody is trochaic with the main stress on the first syllable and a secondary stress on every other following syllable. Finnish also has a ternary stress pattern that surfaces in words where the stress would fall on a light syllable that is followed by a heavy syllable. It has been claimed that the ternary prosodic pattern arises naturally from the interaction of independently motivated constraints such as *Lapse and StressToWeight. The idea has been explored in depth in the Ph.D. thesis of Nine Elenbaas (1999) and summarized in the articles by Elenbaas and Kager (1999) and Kiparsky (2003). The specific conclusion of this paper is that the explanation for the ternary meter offered by Elenbaas and Kiparsky fails systematically for certain input patterns, but a more general point is that OT phonology badly needs computational support. It is difficult to get globally correct results from a handful of examples with the traditional tableau method. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | Phonology,Computation |
| Article: | Version 1 |