Hakka Noun Phrases-A Bidirectional OT Approach on Hakka Relative Clauses

Abstract

This paper discusses the structure of two types of relative clauses, restrictive and non-restrictive, and provides an OT approach grounded in Weak Bidirectional Optimization to account for the syntactic construction of both types of clauses. The paper will show that while the Hakka basic NP structure favors the head to be positioned at the right edge, it is through the OT model of constraint interaction that different ordering patterns can be generated as grammatical outputs for a given input meaning. The first part of the analysis will explain the data by proposing constraints from the production-oriented perspective, as their ranking successfully yields the correct results in a unidirectional OT model. However, in the second part of the analysis, when the data grows more complex and requires syntactic and semantic distinctions between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, the explanatory power of a unidirectional approach turns out to be limited. We find the necessity to adopt a bidirectional model, in which a form-meaning combination can be evaluated as a pair. Moreover, the fact that this innovative OT allows a recursive version of evaluation provides the possibility to generate optimal outputs successively for the two distinctive types of relative clauses under a single constraint ranking.