This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.

This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.

Introductory chaper, topics include: What this book is about; How this book is structured; Who this book is for; Why this book is unique; Some personal comments about John McCarthy; Acknowledgements

This chapter discusses the results of word-likeness rating experiments with Hebrew and English speakers that show that language users use their grammar in a categorical and a gradient manner. In wordlikeness rating tasks, subjects make the categorical distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical – they assign all grammatical forms equally high ratings and all ungrammatical forms equally low ratings. However, in comparative word-likeness tasks, subjects are forced to make distinctions between different grammatical or ungrammatical forms. In these experiments, they make finer gradient well-formedness distinctions. This poses a challenge on the one hand to standard derivational models of generative grammar, which can easily account for the categorical distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical, but have more difficulty with the gradient well-formedness distinctions. It also challenges models in which the categorical distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical does not exist, but in which an ungrammatical form is simply a form with very low probability. It is shown that the inherent comparative character of an OT grammar enables it to model both kinds of behaviors in a straightforward manner.

This chapter examines a well-known generative innatist theory of the phonological component and related modules. It asks what this theory identifies as empirical evidence for it, and for which modules. It also identifies predicted ambiguities, where two or more modules influence the same phenomenon. Specific phenomena discussed include alternations, phonotactics, phonetic neutralization, loanword adaptation, and typological frequency.

The most straightforward theory of how phonologization interacts with Universal Grammar to determine typology is that UG defines the cognitively possible grammars (‘hard’ typology), while phonologization determines how frequent they are (‘soft’ typology). This paper argues instead that some soft typology has a cognitive source, and proposes a formal explanation. Phonological patterns relating tone to tone are shown to be more common than those relating tone to voicing and aspiration (20 families on 5 continents versus 8 families on 4 continents). This soft typological fact cannot be derived from differential robustness of the phonetic precursors, which have similar magnitude (survey of 26 studies of 17 languages). A learning algorithm is proposed in which the learner chooses between Optimality-Theoretic constraint sets based on how probable they make the training data (‘Bayesian Constraint Addition’). This biases the learner towards phonologizing processes driven by ‘modular’ markedness constraints, i.e., ones that interact with few other constraints. Its application to the tone case is illustrated by simulation, and compared with alternatives.

In recent years a number of researchers have argued that, in order to adequately explain contrast and its effects, phonology must be systemic: evaluation of a form cannot occur in isolation from unrelated contrasting forms, but must take such forms – what we call a ‘comparison set’ – into account. This presents a formal and empirical challenge for systemic approaches. This paper explores the comparison set within the general approach of dispersion theory, focusing on two matters: the ‘problem of infinity’ and idealization. A further challenge for the theory, though one shared by many non-systemic approaches too, involves substantiating claims about perceptual distance that underpin the approach. Our discussion of the latter issue focuses on secondary palatalization contrasts in onset versus coda position, with perceptual data from Irish. Our overall goal in this paper is to clarify the nature of these challenges and to outline our own approach to them.

This chapter argues that exceptions and other instances of morphemespecific phonology are best analyzed in Optimality Theory (OT) in terms of lexically indexed markedness and faithfulness constraints. This approach is shown to capture locality restrictions, distinctions between exceptional and truly impossible patterns, distinctions between blocking and triggering, and distinctions between variation and exceptionality. It is contrasted with other OT analyses of exceptions, in particular those that disallow lexically indexed markedness constraints and those that invoke lexically specified rankings (that is, cophonologies). The data discussed are from Assamese, Finnish and Yine (formerly Piro). A learnability account of the genesis of lexically indexed constraints is also provided, in which indexation is used to resolve inconsistency detected by Tesar and Smolensky’s (1998, 2000) Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm.

Source-similarity effects in loanword adaptation are formalized in Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince, 1995). A correspondence relation holds between the loanword and the pLs representation, the borrower’s posited representation of the source-language form; including the pLs representation in the model allows a consistent account of the interaction between phonological adaptation processes and factors such as perception and orthography. Empirical support is provided for the Correspondence Theory approach, which predicts multiple phonological adaptation strategies for loanwords.

This chapter reviews contemporary approaches to the morphological influences on stress in certain Pama-Nyungan languages, including Diyari, Dyirbal, and Warlpiri. To account for the variation found in these languages, nine different theories are developed that diff er in the constraints responsible for edge effects in stress and the alignment of morphological and prosodic structure. The factorial typologies of each theory are analyzed and shown to support three conclusions concerning the analysis of morphological stress in particular and the nature of constraints in general. First, stringency or ‘special-general’ relations between two morpho-prosodic alignment constraints are necessary because theories without these stringency relations either do not describe all of the data or predict the existence of rather implausible stress patterns. Second, while some constraints that require gradient constraint evaluation can (and indeed must) be dispensed with, it appears that gradiently assessed constraints like ALLFEETLEFT are still necessary. Third, there is both theoretical and empirical support for the recursive prosodic word analysis of (McCarthy and Prince, 1994). This analysis is also shown to make predictions about logically possible systems that may be explored in future work.

This chapter shows that epenthetic and lexical vowels in Lebanese Arabic, which are often transcribed as identical, are acoustically distinct: epenthetic vowels are either shorter or backer or both. It is argued that this incomplete neutralization is the result of phonetics optionally accessing an intermediate level of phonological derivation. This is formalized in Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC): epenthesis requires a multi-step candidate chain, and phonetics can access any step of the chain. Furthermore, it is suggested that the acoustic distinction helps learners construct the correct candidate chains for words with epenthetic vs. lexical vowels.

In one of the pioneering works of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), McCarthy (1993a) offers a comprehensiveanalysis of r-insertion in non-rhotic dialects of English, and suggests that the constraint driving the process is not an onset-related constraint, but rather a constraint requiring prosodic words to end in a consonant (‘FINAL-C’). While morphological categories such as roots or stems are sometimes subject to templatic requirements involving an obligatory final consonant, independent evidence for a requirement of this kind on genuine prosodic constituents, such as surface prosodic words, is sparse. This paper shows that, while McCarthy’s treatment remains, in its essentials, a model of optimality-theoretic analysis, it is unnecessary to take recourse to FINAL-C once the onset requirements for different levels of the prosodic hierarchy, together with their associated faithfulness properties, are better understood.

This chapter examines data from the languages Palauan and Akkadian where identical infixes and prefixes respond differently to feature cooccurrence restrictions (OCP). In both languages, OCP is enforced on the root domain. While prefixes are not subject to OCP, identical infixes need to conform to OCP restrictions. To explain the asymmetry between identical infixes and prefixes, it is proposed that infixes are part of the root morpheme in the output while prefixes are outside of the root domain. Infixes become part of the output root morpheme via a process of what is here referred to as morpheme absorption. Empirical consequences of this proposal are explored.

The long vowels in Classical Arabic verb stems that are concomitant with glide deletion can be characterized as cases of compensatory lengthening. Glide deletion, however, does not always result in a long vowel. This chapter proposes that cases of short vowels resulting from glide deletion are the consequence of constraint conflict defined by Optimality Theory. The distribution of long vowels in verb stems involves constraints on the verb stem conflicting with syllable markedness and faithfulness constraints. This paper argues for a triconsonantal analysis of all verb roots containing glides, contra Gafos (2003). This paper also argues for a prosodic analysis of verb stems, in accordance with the Prosodic Morphology Hypothesis. The prosodic organization, however, is obscured by conflict with higher ranking constraints.

This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.

This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.

This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.

This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.

This volume presents a series of original papers focusing on phonological argumentation, set within the framework of Optimality Theory. It contains two major sections: chapters about the evidence for and methodology used in discovering the bases of phonological theory, i.e., how constraints are formed and what sort of evidence is relevant in positing them; and case studies that focus on particular theoretical issues within Optimality Theory, usually through selected phenomena in one or more languages, arguing in favor of or against specific formal analyses. A noteworthy detail of this book is that all of the contributors are connected with the program in phonology and phonetics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, either as current professors or former graduate students. Consequently, all of them have been directly influenced by John McCarthy, one of the major proponents of Optimality Theory. This collection will therefore be of interest to anyone who seriously follows the field of Optimality Theory. The intended readership is primarily graduate students and those already holding an advanced degree in linguistics.