Faithfulness Constraints Research Articles

English Voicing Assimilation

Park, Jeong-hee. “English Voicing Assimilation.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 35.4(2009): 291-306. This paper shows the explanation of English Voicing Assimilation by means of using the interaction with markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints within Optimality Theory. By using the binary obstruent voicing features, [+voice] and [-voice], as well as by changing the definition of AGREE into AGREE/σ we can explain the progressive and regressive assimilation. Also, we separate two levels of affixation: derivational affixes relating to regressive assimilation and inflectional affixes for progressive assimilation. (Sogang University)

How to choose a prosodic template. On verb innovation and variation in Hebrew

Abstract This paper examines the factors that play a role in blocking and non-blocking in verb formation in Modern Hebrew. Hebrew verbs are formed in prosodic templates (so-called binyanim) that consist of a vocalic template and affixes in some of them. I address the criteria for the selection of such templates with regard to verb innovation, relation between existing forms and variation of forms. I will show that the selection of a particular binyan is the result of an interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints on the one hand and thematic-syntactic considerations on the other hand. While certain constraints block the formation of verbs in some binyanim, there are cases of non-crucial ranking of constraints that gives rise to free variation of existing forms.

A study of ranking paradox of faithfulness constraints in the /p/-irregular stems of Korean.

A study of ranking paradox of faithfulness constraints in the /p/-irregular stems of Korean.

Dhochi: A Dholuo Language Game*

This paper presents a description and an Optimality Theoretic analysis of Dhochi, a language game of Dholuo. To our knowledge this game has escaped the notice of linguists but it has several properties that make it interesting both to those working on Dholuo and to those who work on secret languages in general. The game falls into the general category of ‘reversing games’. We propose that all reversing games are the result of the same process: a phonologically empty morpheme that is concatenated with the word and is then phonetically realized by movement out of linear order of some of the phonological material of the base word into the affix position. The target of movement as well as the landing site for the moved element is determined by different rankings of the game specific faithfulness constraints.

A sonority-based approach to Sino-Japanese compounds

Abstract This article proposes a sonority-based approach to Sino-Japanese morphophonemic alternations. An earlier OT analysis by Kurisu (2000) sees Sino-Japanese obstruent gemination as the result of minimization of the number of syllables induced by a gradient alignment constraint. However, gradient evaluation of constraints runs counter to McCarthy’s (2003) argument that OT constraints are categorically evaluated. The goal of this article is to resolve this problem by developing a unified OT analysis of obstruent gemination and syllabification of stem-final nasals as codas with reference to onset sonority distinctions. Less sonorous segments have a stronger preference to syllabify as onsets than do more sonorous segments. This preference relationship between segment classes and syllabification has been formalized as the Onset Sonority Hierarchy (Prince & Smolensky 1993; Baertsch 2002; Smith 2003; Moreton et al 2006; etc). By taking the position that local conjunction of onset sonority and peak constraints plays the central role in creating the observed syllabification pattern through interaction with faithfulness and other markedness constraints, this analysis also makes it possible to view the segmental restrictions on the onsets of the second syllables of Sino-Japanese stems as a concomitant onset sonority effect.

Language acquisition in optimality theory

In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for pro!

Syllable Onsets in Germanic: Three Case Studies

Green (2003) proposes that the composition of syllable onsets is regulated by a “universally and intrinsically ranked set of Onset-Well-Formedness (OWF) constraints,” according to which syllable onsets with steep-rising sonority (e.g, stop – glide onsets) are preferred to syllable onsets with shallow-rising sonority (e.g, stop – fricative onsets), which are in turn preferred to syllable onsets with falling sonority (e.g, fricative – stop onsets). In Green’s view, “[e]xactly which onsets a particular language tolerates will be determined by the ranking of the OWF constraints with respect to faithfulness constraints, or to a constraint against syllable codas, or to a constraint against rising sonority across a syllable boundary” (Green 2003: 239). In this paper, I investigate the status of Green’s OWF constraints in three Germanic languages: Gothic, Faroese, and German. Before doing so, the limits of this work must be established. First, Green’s paper is couched within Optimality Theory (OT), but the formalism in this paper is extremely limited. Secondly, the discussion here is restricted to word-internal syllable onsets, as word-initial onsets have a somewhat different status in all of the languages discussed here. It is clear that most languages permit a wider range of onsets word-initially than word-internally. For instance, in English, as Hammond (1999) points out, [pw] and [bw] onsets are only permitted word-initially, and then only in loan words like pueblo and bwana, and this type of phenomenon is by no means rare. Such onsets can generally be handled by means of various FAITHFULNESS constraints, i.e, constraints regulating the relationship between the input and the output. The constraints I have in mind here ban deleting, inserting, and reordering segments, and must outrank any constraints banning various types of onsets. Since deleting a segment, inserting a segment, and reordering segments are blocked, these onsets must be maintained. Word-internally, of course, there is another way to eliminate dispreferred syllable onsets, namely by moving segments into the coda of the preceding syllable. Hence, in my view, word-internal onsets lend more insight into the phonology of a language, and I therefore focus on them here, although I return briefly to word-initial onsets at the end of the paper.

The contribution of polysyllabic words in clinical decision making about children's speech

Poor polysyllabic word (PSW) production seems to mark paediatric speech impairment as well as impairment in language, literacy and phonological processing. As impairment in these domains may only manifest in PSWs, PSW production may provide unique information that is often excluded from clinical decision making because insufficient PSWs are included in speech tests. A 5‐stage model of PSW acquisition is described. The model, grounded in optimality theory, expresses a reciprocal relationship between the relaxation of markedness constraints and the contraction of faithfulness constraints from 12 months of age to adolescence. The markedness constraints that persist to the age of 7;11 years are associated with non‐final weak syllables and within‐word consonant sequences. Output changes are argued to reflect increasing specification of phonological representations with age, liberating information for motor planning and execution, resulting in increasingly accurate output. The clinical implications of PSWs in assessment and therapy are discussed.

Creole Phonology: An Alternative to Markedness-Based Accounts

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Dep: Beyond Epenthesis

The correspondence-theoretic constraint Dep (McCarthy and Prince 1995) is often informally described as a constraint against epenthesis. While Dep does militate against epenthesis in input-output mappings, it has a more technical sense when applied to other domains, such as base-reduplicant correspondence and output-output correspondence. The goal of this squib is to show that Dep constraints do more than block epenthesis. In the domain of base-reduplicant correspondence, the high ranking of Dep-BR can result in underapplication of deletion, as in the case of Tonkawa. In the domain of output-output correspondence, DepOO is known to require overapplication of deletion in paradigmatically related forms. All of these effects follow from McCarthy and Prince’s definition of Dep as a family of faithfulness constraints that require a match between two strings that stand in correspondence. This discussion sheds light on a long-standing ambiguity in classic Optimality Theory: does the treatment of epenthesis really require a faithfulness constraint, or is markedness sufficient? On the face of it, epenthesis is an unfaithful mapping, and as such should violate faithfulness. As Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004) and McCarthy and Prince (1993) point out, however, epenthesis typically compounds markedness violations, as well—for example, if a candidate contains an epenthetic [h], it incurs one more violation of the constraint against the feature [spread glottis] than candidates without [h]-epenthesis. If we follow Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004), McCarthy and Prince (1993), and Zoll (1996) in assuming that

Some listener-oriented accounts of h-aspiré in French

This article shows that the usual speaker-based account of h-aspiré in French can explain at most three of the four phonological processes in which it is involved, whereas a listener-oriented account can explain all of them. On a descriptive level, the behaviour of h-aspiré is accounted for with a grammar model that involves a control loop, whose crucial ingredient is listener-oriented faithfulness constraints. These constraints evaluate phonological recoverability, which is the extent to which the speaker thinks the listener will be able to recover the phonological message. On a more reductionist level, however, the pronunciation of h-aspiré and its variation is accounted for with a new, very simple, grammar model for bidirectional phonology and phonetics, which uses a single constraint set for the four processes of perception, recognition, phonological production, and phonetic implementation, and in which phonological and phonetic production are evaluated in parallel. In this model, the phenomenon of phonological recoverability is not built in, as in control-loop grammars, but emerges from the interaction of four equally simple learning algorithms.

Constraining Welsh vowel mutation

Welsh vowel mutation is a purely positional vowel alternation, the effects of which serve to obscure phonemic contrasts between three vowels in the system, namely barred-i, schwa and [u]. The theoretical interest in this alternation stems from the surface orientation of current phonological theory: is such a non-surface-true state of affairs amenable to plausible modelling in an optimality-theoretic framework, or are the relevant relationships best accounted for through lexical listing? In this paper I argue that a straightforward optimality-theoretic account is available and that this account is simpler than any of its predecessors. The analysis differs from previous derivational analyses (e.g. Thomas 1979, 1984; Williams 1983; Bosch 1996) in various ways, including the underlying values of some of the vowels involved, the avoidance of ad hoc extrinsic rule ordering, and the lack of reliance on intermediate representations. Furthermore, reference to phonological position alone is sufficient, with no need to refer either to stress or to morphological complexity. The correct results emerge primarily through the interaction of a high-ranking structural constraint prohibiting schwa in a final syllable, an input–output faithfulness constraint on vowel features, and a constraint prohibiting a high central rounded vowel, [u with bar through].

An Optimality Theoretic Analysis of Phonetically Motivated /n/-insertion

/n/-insertion takes place after a consonant followed by /i, j/ in Korean. Previous studies on /n/-insertion have not systematically investigated the reason why it occurs. Thus the first aim of this paper is to answer the questions why /n/-insertion occurs and furthermore why /n/ is inserted. The second aim is to provide an Optimality Theoretic analysis of /n/-insertion. There are three points we make throughout this paper. Firstly, /n/-insertion is motivated on perceptual grounds: to strengthen the morphemic boundaries and help smoother transition in morphemic concatenation. Secondly, it is /n/ that is the least salient consonant before /i/. We conduct a phonetic experiment comparing F1 and F2 transition of /i/ after /n/ and /l/ to prove that /n/ as opposed to /l/ is the least salient consonant before /i/. Thirdly, the faithfulness constraint, Dep (salient), which has a gradient nature, plays a crucial role in the Optimality Theoretic account for /n/-insertion.

Gaps and repairs at the phonology–morphology interface

The paper discusses phonologically motivated gaps in inflectional paradigms. A model is offered in which the appearance of gaps is based on a tension between markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, and constraints which require the expression of morphological categories. After presenting the model, additional implications are analyzed. Situations in which the same problem has different solutions in different morphological contexts are predicted insofar as constraints requiring the expression of different categories can vary in their ranking relative to some faithfulness constraint. Hence, the same phonotactic problem can yield a gap in one situation and a repair in another. This prediction is illustrated and further details of the prediction are explored, including the identification of a situation requiring a more restrictive version of the model. This is achieved by drawing on Smith's (2001) proposal that faithfulness constraints can be indexed to lexical categories to model this situation.

Reduction in syllable onsets in the acquisition of Polish: deletion, coalescence, metathesis and gemination

This paper focuses on four strategies of onset reduction employed by a single child (4;0-4;4) acquiring Polish: deletion, coalescence, metathesis, and gemination. Deletion and coalescence occur in word-initial onsets while metathesis and gemination are restricted to word-medial position. The data, which constitute an intriguing 'conspiracy' case (Kisseberth, 1970), are analysed within OPTIMALITY THEORY (henceforth, OT; Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy & Prince, 1995) in which all surface-true 'processes' are motivated through the interaction of ranked and violable constraints. The OT account makes it possible to envisage the four strategies as different surface responses to the undominated *COMPLEXOnset which militates against onset clusters. The choice of a particular strategy as well as its restriction to a particular word position is not random but follows from the interplay between *COMPLEXOnset, sonority-based syllable structure constraints (Margin Hierarchy, CONTACT LAW), context-sensitive markedness constraints (CODA CONDITION, *Nasal-Fricative) and faithfulness constraints. The present study confirms previous sonority-based findings, supplies further evidence for universal sonority mechanisms from word-medial clusters, and points to the coexistence of child-specific and abstract adult-based phonological strategies in the child's system.

Constraints on the metathesis of sonorant consonants in Judeo-Spanish

Judeo-Spanish denotes those varieties of Spanish preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and have emigrated throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. This paper analyzes several types of sonorant consonant metathesis in Judeo-Spanish within the framework of Optimality Theory. Following Holt's (2004) account of Old Spanish, local metathesis of dl , dn , and nr clusters is analyzed as a repair strategy for bad syllable contact. A novel analysis is proposed in which nasal place assimilation and positional faithfulness constraints account for the failure of dm metathesis in morphologically derived environments. Judeo-Spanish also has two types of innovative rhotic metathesis that cannot be explained in terms of syllable contact. The rd > dr shift is analyzed as an effect of the Obligatory Contour Principle, whereby adjacent segments identical in place, manner, and voicing specifications are prohibited. The second type involves the displacement of r toward the left edge of a word, also frequently attested in popular Modern Spanish. A comprehensive account of rhotic metathesis is developed, following recent work on position-specific constraint evaluation (Riggle and Wilson 2005) and segmental adjacency constraints (Carpenter 2002).

Ditidaht Vowel Alternations and Prosody

Among the Southern Wakashan languages, Ditidaht has patterns of short vowel epenthesis and deletion that are unusually complex. It is shown that the surface presence or absence of short vowels is determined not by their underlying presence or absence, but by how segments are parsed by prosodic constituents. An optimality theoretic analysis is developed, according to which vowel alternations result from the low ranking of faithfulness constraints (MAX/V and DEP/V) relative to constraints on the forms of syllables, feet, and prosodic words. Vowel presence creates ideal iambic feet, makes prosodic words minimally disyllabic, and ensures that adducted consonants (those that involve adducting the vocal folds for glottalization or voicing) are vowel-adjacent. Vowel absence ensures that prosodic words end in consonants, and eliminates unfooted syllables. An additional finding is that all adducted consonants must be postvocalic. Résumé

Zero Derivation in English: Base-Identity and Constraint Indexation

This paper argues that stress patterns that occur in zero derivation is best analyzed in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1995) in terms of faithfulness and lexically indexed markedness constraints. This approach is shown to capture distinctions between generality and exceptionality of stress patterns in zero derivation. Based on a variety of evidence, I argue that zero-derived forms should be faithful to their base, and that exceptions to the patterns are confined only to a restricted set of words. Assuming that a single constraint can be multiply instantiated in a constraint hierarchy, and each instantiation may be indexed to apply to a particular set of lexical items (cf. Fukuzawa, 1999; Ito & Mester, 1999, 2001; Kraska-Szelenk, 1997, 1999; Pater, 2000), I specifically claim that the lexically indexed markedness constraint WORD STRESSL outranks the faithfulness constraint Base-Identity, which in turn ranks above the general markedness constraint WORD STRESS. It is shown that with the constraint ranking, all the stress patterns that occur in zero derivation can be accounted for straightforwardly. In so doing, I also show that under the analysis adopted in this paper, the prediction that new zero-derived forms always retain the stress pattern of the base is borne out from the high ranking of the faithfulness constraint Base-Identity.

Early Child Grammars: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Production

This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person-number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is argued that acquisition of morphosyntax proceeds via overlapping grammars (rather than through abrupt changes), which OT formalizes in terms of partial rather than total constraint rankings. Initially, economy of structure constraints take priority over faithfulness constraints that demand faithful expression of a speaker's intent, resulting in child production of tense that is comparable in level to that of child-directed speech. Using the independent Predominant Length of Utterance measure of syntactic development proposed in Vainikka, Legendre, and Todorova (1999), production of agreement is shown first to lag behind tense then to compete with tense at an intermediate stage of development. As the child's development progresses, faithfulness constraints become more dominant, and the overall production of tense and agreement becomes adult-like.

A Faithfulness Ranking Projected from a Perceptibility Scale: The Case of [+ Voice] in Japanese

Within the framework of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004), Steriade (2001a,b) proposes the P-map hypothesis, whose fundamental tenet is that the rankings of faithfulness constraints are grounded in perceptual-similarity rankings. This article provides empirical support for this hypothesis. In Japanese loanword phonology, a voiced geminate, but not a singleton, devoices to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent within a single stem. Based on this observation, I argue that the [ voice] feature is protected by two different faithfulness constraints,IDENT( voi)Sing and IDENT( voi)Gem, and they are ranked as IDENT( voi)Sing � IDENT( voi)Gem in Japanese. I further argue that this ranking is grounded in the relative perceptibility of [ voice] in singletons and geminates, and this claim is experimentally supported. The general theoretical implication is that phonetic perceptibility can directly influence patterns in a phonological grammar.