| ROA: | 44 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Morphemes and Candidates in Optimality Theory |
| Authors: | Kevin Russell |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 46 |
| Abstract: | Morphemes and Candidates in Optimality Theory ROA-44 morcan.ps 46pp. Kevin Russell krussll@cc.umanitoba.ca This paper, like Mike Hammond's "There is no lexicon!", argues that underlying representations are unnecessary in OT and that the phonological information related with morphemes should be coded in/enforced by constraints in Eval. I argue that doing things this way is not just conceptually simpler, but might actually give better empirical results. I look at two cases of coalescence, where it seems as though a single piece of a representation belongs to more than one morpheme at the same time. The first is coronal coalescence in Nisgha, where, for example, "underlying" /naks-t-s-t/ is realized as [naks] for reasons that have nothing to do with syllable structure or phonotactics. The second is verbal ablaut in Hua, where the stem final vowel undergoes changes based on a complicated interaction of factors such as person/number agreement, verb class, and the identity of the following morpheme. Standard OT would have problems with these cases, since much of its machinery is designed to forbid multiple exponence. But if morphemes are constraints, Nisgha and Hua are simply unexceptional cases where the same piece of a representation satisfies more than one constraint. There's also some discussion about how many of the complications in the OT architecture are caused by the need to deal with URs, and about how devices like faithfulness constraints and multiple grammars might be done away with in a morphemic constraints framework. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |