| ROA: | 72 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Rules vs. Constraints: a Case Study |
| Authors: | Bernard Tranel |
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| Abstract: | Rules vs. Constraints: A Case Study ROA-72 rul-v-con.rtf Bernard Tranel University of California, Irvine In this paper, I sketch a cross-theoretical comparison of the treatment of prefixal floating high tones in Mixteco (a language of Southern Mexico studied by Kenneth Pike in the 1930's and 40's), and argue in favor of Optimality Theory and violable universal constraints, as opposed to the more traditional derivational framework relying on language-specific rules and unviolable constraints. The traditional constraints/conventions of relevance here are the line-crossing constraint (LCC) and the universal association convention (UAC) automatically linking free tones to free anchors. The associative behavior of Mixteco's floating high tones is shown to violate these two purportedly unviolable constraints/conventions. Thus, the effect of the UAC is basically to parse free tones without disturbing anchored tones or toned anchors (exhaustive one-to-one tonal parsing), but the transparency of Mixteco's mid-tone vowels (viewed as phonologically toneless) to the association of floating high tones reveals that this effect may conflict with - and lose out to - other universal demands of a morphological and phonological nature (specifically, constraints on affixation and on the preservation of input tonal prominence profiles). Similarly, the LCC proves too powerful to explain the discriminating facts that Mixteco's medial glottal stops form a barrier to the association of floating high tones and thwart the transparency of mid-tone vowels (in accordance with the LCC under the assumption that high tones and glottal stops share a feature-geometric tier), but that initial glottal stops do not (in violation of the LCC). By contrast, a fundamental tenet of OT is that the power of universal constraints can be modulated (violability); in this case, the inadequately rigid LCC is essentially recast into more elementary and more malleable terms pertaining to Alignment Theory, Faithfulness Conditions, and Constraint Interaction. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
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| Article: | Version 1 |