Markedness Constraints Research Articles

How English-Learning Infants Respond to Markedness and Faithfulness Constraints

According to the nativist interpretation of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky (1993)), all language learners are born with a set of universal constraints. Learnability arguments entail that, in the initial state, markedness constraints outrank faithfulness constraints (Prince (personal communication, September 26, 1993), Smolensky (1996a), Tesar and Smolensky (2000)). This study investigates whether English learners give evidence of observing markedness and faithfulness constraints relating to nasal place assimilation. Employing the Headturn Preference Procedure (Jusczyk (1998b), Kemler Nelson et al. (1995)), these investigations introduce a general experimental paradigm for exploring infants' phonological grammars. English learners at 4.5 and 10 months of age gave evidence of observing both markedness and faithfulness constraints and ranked markedness above faithfulness. After a brief instability around 15 months, at 20 months they display the adult English pattern, with markedness outranking faithfulness.

Case Study: Optimality Theory and the Assessment and Treatment of Phonological Disorders.

Recently, the development of the constraint-based framework of optimality theory has been adopted and applied to the assessment and treatment of children with phonological disorders. This paper provides a demonstration of the application of optimality theory to the assessment and treatment of a single child with a phonological disorder. First, a tutorial of the theory is provided. Then, several prototypical error patterns evident in the child's productions are analyzed within the framework. These errors are accounted for by assuming that constraints against marked structure are ranked over constraints that require faithfulness to input forms within the child's grammar. Following that, a demonstration of how optimality theory accounts for different types of variation in the child's productions is provided. These different types of variation are revealing of the true nature of certain error patterns, particularly an apparent pattern of cluster reduction. Finally, the results of the analysis lead to suggestions for treatment that focus on the demotion of markedness constraints below faithfulness constraints.

The puzzle of Kashmiri stress: implications for weight theory

There are currently many proposals for analysing cross-linguistic vowel length and consonant weight patterns within an Optimality Theory (OT) framework. The basic claim is that vowel length and consonant weight are determined by the interaction of markedness constraints on moraic content and constraints requiring faithfulness to underlying moraicity.In this paper, I will show how the constraints used in one such proposal (Morén 1999) provide an analysis of the core syllable weight of Kashmiri, and that the inclusion of several other constraints proposed in the literature allows us to account for the previously puzzling distribution of stress in this language. Besides the empirical importance of both providing an analysis of Kashmiri stress and weight and demonstrating a language type predicted by Morén's weight typology, an added theoretical point is the demonstration that closed syllables may vary in weight depending on surface stress assignment. This is in line with work of Kager (1989), Hayes (1995), Rice (1996) and Broselow et al. (1997), but in contrast with many other theories which treat consonant weight for a particular segment in a given syllabic position as static within a given language. Further, the OT analysis presented here provides the necessary tools to allow the expression of weight hierarchies, while maintaining the restrictive theory of weight offered by a single-tiered moraic approach.

On the Role of Sympathy in Acquisition

Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluation of a newly proposed type of correspondence relation within optimality theory (McCarthy and Prince (1995), Prince and Smolensky (1993)) namely sympathy. Sympathy has been advanced to account for certain opacity effects in fully developed languages. Given the claims of the theory, comparable opacity effects are expected to occur in the course of acquisition. Toward this end, different interactions of two common phenomena-that is, final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants-are examined with a focus on a case study of 2 young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. We argue that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects naturally emerge in the course of development from the harmonic ranking of sympathy over input-output faithfulness and the incremental demotion of markedness constraints.

Syllabically conditioned coalescence and deletion in Zoque: an optimality-theoretic approach

This article analyzes consonant coalescence (e.g. |yp| → [p y ]) and consonant deletion in the Mixe-Zoque language Zoque spoken in southern Mexico. These processes will be argued to function as repair strategies necessary to convert underlying forms into syllabically well formed surface representations. Cast within optimality theory, the analysis accounts for the Zoque facts with the interaction of several universal faithfulness and markedness constraints, e.g. UNIFORMITY, which penalizes the merger of two separate segments into a single complex sound, and MAX-C, the faithfulness constraint that prevents deletion. The present treatment also provides examples of emergence of the unmarked because two constraints that are generally violated in Zoque are obeyed in a certain domain. The two constraints illustrating the emergence of the unmarked are NOCODA, which ensures that all syllables are open, and * H] σ , which bars [h] from occurring in syllable-final position.

Distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word

In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
 
 In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.

Asymmetrical Cluster Development in a Disordered System

A longitudinal account is presented of a child with a phonological disorder (Participant 24; age 4;9) who demonstrates an asymmetrical pattern of cluster development with two different reduction strategies. It is argued that the child represents all clusters as single underlying units at the first point in time. At later points in time she represents only certain clusters as single units. Formulated within Optimality Theory, the account shows that change occurs via constraint reranking and input restructuring. This obtains from assumptions about structural representations and demotion of markedness constraints. Important to the account and the validity of the framework is that demoted constraints are still active in the grammar, resulting in cases of emergent unmarkedness. This account shows to be preferable over a possible derivational account in that continuity is preserved over time. Implications regarding structural representations, learning, and change are addressed.

The Wave Model of Linguistic Change and the Naturalness of Interlanguage

This paper investigates the question of whether the Wave Model of linguistic change can furnish a valid idealization for the patterning of variation in interlanguage systems and, thereby, a scale for the determination of their degree of naturalness. Using cross-sectional data from 162 French-speaking adult learners, the paper analyzes the variability in the evolution of the English possessive determiners HIS and HER. The main findings are as follows:1. The Wave Model furnishes a valid idealization for acquisitional change.2. The developmental continuum reveals that L2, acquisition appears to involve a greater scope of variability. Change may be initiated in a more marked environment at a point when the rule change process is not yet fully completed in the less marked environment. Nonetheless, the proportion of learners showing variable application of the mature rule in only one environment at a time as opposed to those with variable application in both is more than 2:1.3. Less natural systems evidence rule blockage and/or compartmentalization of the marked environment; rule conflict between noncontiguous parts of the rule, and violation of markedness constraints.4. Premature adoption of gender marking on the possessive determiners or, more generally, failure to approach the target language rule with an unmarked, initial hypothesis is one important source of unnaturalness in rule variability.The data analysis leads up to a number of other issues in interlanguage research such as inter-learner variation, the ‘acquisition-learning’ distinction, and the relationship between the Simple Codes Hypothesis and unsuccessful L2, acquisition.

Redundancy, Markedness, and Simultaneous Constraints in Phonology

Redundancy, Markedness, and Simultaneous Constraints in Phonology