<OT> New Posting: ROA-673

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 673-0804

Gradient Grammaticality as an Effect of Selective Constraint Re-ranking

Frank Keller <keller at inf.ed.ac.uk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=673


Abstract:
The validity of a grammatical framework can be verified
in at least the three ways: (a) by showing its applicability
to wide range of linguistic phenomena, (b) by demonstrating
the soundness of its formal foundations, and (c) by verifying
its compatibility with experimental evidence. As for Optimality
Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), option (a) has been
pursued extensively in the recent phonological literature
(and to a lesser extend in the syntactic literature). Also
option (b) has been the the topic of some research (e.g.,
Ellison 1994, Karttunen 1998). However, no attempts have
been made so far to test the concepts and mechanisms assumed
in OT against experimental evidence.

The present paper attempts to fill this gap by testing OT
against evidence from what is probably the most natural
empirical domain for a linguistic framework: grammaticality
judgments. More specifically, we focus on the phenomenon
of gradience in linguistic data. We argue that gradient
data can serve as a tool for evaluating the status of suboptimal
candidates in OT, an approach that allows to scrutinize
OT's concepts of constraint ranking and constraint interaction.
The experimental data we present show that constraint violations
are cumulative, and that two types of constraints have to
be distinguished: hard and soft ones. These results lend
limited support to the notion of constraint ranking assumed
in OT, and seem compatible with OT's concept of strict domination
of constraints.

The second part of this paper deals with the theoretical
issues arising from an attempt to model gradient linguistic
data in OT. We show that a naive model that equates relative
grammaticality with relative optimality is not tenable,
and propose an alternative approach based on the concept
of selective constraint re-ranking. This approach, which
is grounded in OT learnability theory, predicts the cumulativity
of constraint violations, and allows to model the distinction
between hard and soft constraints, thus accounting for the
experimental findings.

Comments: In M. Catherine Gruber, Derrick Higgins, Kenneth S. Olson, and Tamra Wysocki, eds., Papers from the 34th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol. 2: The Panels, 95-109. Chicago, 1998.
Keywords: gradience, re-ranking, learnability
Areas: Syntax,Learnability,Psycholinguistics
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=673