| Abstract: | The paper examines the phenomenon of paradigmatic scale building among strong verbs in German in the framework of Optimality Theory. Essentially, characteristic strong verb morphology tends to be replaced by the weak forms with time. This replacement seems to proceed not for all verbs at the same time, not for all forms at the same time, but on a regular basis, following a kind of implicative scale. Optimality Theory, introduced by Prince and Smolensky as a grammar model in generative phonology, has recently gained popularity in other domains of linguistic research as well, but work on pure morphology is still infrequent and there is no agreed upon framework for representing realizations of morphosyntactic features via rules. The paper takes a step in the direction of establishing OT potential in morphology and suggests some extensions to the standard concept of a constraint in OT which can serve to represent such rules and proposes a tentative explanation of the phenomenon of scale building in the modified framework. |
