The Mother of All Tableaux - Order, Equivalence, and Geometry in the Large-scale Structure of Optimality Theory - Nazarré Merchant
Introduction
The Mother of All Tableaux - Order, Equivalence, and Geometry in the Large-scale Structure of Optimality Theory - Nazarré Merchant
Nazarré Merchant [+]
Eckerd College, St Petersburg, Florida
Nazarré Merchant is a Professor of Mathematics at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Rutgers University.
Alan Prince [+]
Independent Scholar
Alan Prince has worked on prosody, prosodic morphology, cognitive science of language, and Optimality Theory while teaching at several universities in the United States.
Description
system, grammar, typology are defined. The three key problems are stated: (1) What defining characteristics must all Violation Tableaux (VT) representations of a typology share? (2) When does a set of grammars constitute an OT typology? (3) When does a subset of the grammars in a typology form a coherent class that can be described as a kind of super-grammar? An order and equivalence structure on grammars, the ‘Mother of All Tableaux’ (MOAT), is introduced as a graphical structure similar to a Hasse diagram, and it is shown in broad strokes how it resolves these problems.