<OT> New Posting: ROA-936

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 936-1107

Paradigmatic scale building in OT: The case of strong verbs in German

Anatoli Strigin <strigin at zas.gwz-berlin.de>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=936


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.

Comments: 
Keywords:  ot, morphology, scales, realisation constraints, paradigm
Areas: Morphology,Computation
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=936