<OT> New Posting: ROA-842

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 842-0606

Lexically Ranked OCP-Place Constraits in Muna

Andries W Coetzee <coetzee at umich.edu>
Joe Pater <pater at linguist.umass.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=842


Abstract:
In this paper, we analyze the consonant co-occurrence restriction
s in the Austronesian language Muna, showing that, as in
Arabic homorganic consonants are underrepresented. However,
we also show that the Muna differs from Arabic - in Muna,
[voice] plays a much more important role. We analyze the
Muna restrictions within Optimality Theory, using OCP-PLACE
constraints relativized to [voice], [continuant], and [sonorant].
We claim that these constraints are ranked according the
frequency with which they are violated in the lexicon. Interspers
ed amongst these OCP-PLACE constraints are lexically specific
faithfulness constraints. We show how such a grammar can
be used to explain gradient phonological well-formedness
judgments that correspond to.frequency statistics calculated
over the lexicon. Nonce words do not have a lexical indexation,
and when the grammar evaluates a non-word, it considers
the nonce word under all possible indexations. The nonce
word is assigned a well-formedness score based on the number
of indexations under which it would be parsed faithfully.
We also show how a grammar that is sensitive to lexical
frequency can be learned using a slightly augmented version
of the Biased Constraint Demotion algorithm (Prince and
Tesar 2004). Lastly, we show that the Muna data are problematic
for the general similarity avoidance model of Frisch et
al. (2004).


Comments: 
Keywords: gradience, learnability, OCP, phonotactics, Muna
Areas: Phonology
Type: Book

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=842