<OT> New Posting: ROA-818

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 818-0406

The Insufficiency of Paper-and-Pencil Linguistics: the Case of Finnish Prosody

Lauri Karttunen <karttunen at parc.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=818


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.

Comments: 
Keywords: Finnish, prosody, finite-state
Areas: Phonology,Computation
Type: Book Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=818