<OT> New Posting: ROA-745

[Rutgers Optimality Archive]

ROA 746-0605

Phonology Limited

Antony D. Green <toniogreen at web.de>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=745


Abstract:
Phonological theory was revolutionized by the 1993 appearance of Prince 
and Smolensky's manuscript 'Optimality theory: Constraint interaction 
in generative grammar', finally published eleven years later. The idea 
that all phonological processes in all languages could be reduced to a 
language-specific hierarchical ranking of universal constraints proved 
highly attractive to theoretical linguists around the world, but it 
remains of course very controversial as well, with many preeminent 
linguists either unconvinced of its accuracy or convinced of its 
inaccuracy. In 'Phonology Limited' I intend to address some of the 
concerns that opponents of optimality theory (OT) have brought up, and 
to argue that many problems encountered in OT are solved by allowing 
not only universal constraints on phonological well-formedness 
(markedness constraints) into the theory, but language-specific 
constraints on morphemes as well. Previous approaches that have assumed 
only universal markedness constraints have run into problems with 
phonological opacity, allomorphy, static irregularities, and lexical 
exceptions, and have often required very powerful mechanisms to deal 
with those problems. In this book, on the other hand, I argue that any 
process commonly held to be 'morphophonological' is actually part of 
the morphology and is to be analyzed in terms of language-specific 
morphological constraints. As a result, phonology is based on the 
interaction of faithfulness constraints with truly universal markedness 
constraints; everything language-specific is allocated to the lexicon.

Comments:
Keywords: Universality, allomorphy, opacity, lexical exceptions, 
Hebrew, Irish, Welsh, English
Areas: Phonology, Morphology
Type: Book

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=745