Phonological theory and the development of prosodic structure

2001 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 65-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitsuhiko Ota
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Data ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Word Production ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Structure Development ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Word Size ◽  
Compensatory Lengthening ◽  
Prosodic Categories

This article presents a model of prosodic structure development that takes account of the fundamental continuity between child and adult systems, the surface level divergence of child forms from their adult target forms, and the overall developmental paths of prosodic structure. The main empirical base for the study comes from longitudinal data collected from three Japanese-speaking children (1; 0–2; 6). Evidence for word-internal prosodic constituents including the mora and the foot is found in compensatory lengthening phenomena, syllable size restrictions and word size restrictions in early word production. By implementing the representational principles that organize these prosodic categories as rankable and violable constraints, Optimality Theory can provide a systematic account of the differences in the prosodic structure of child and adult Japanese while assuming representational continuity between the two. A constraint-based model of prosodic structure acquisition is also shown to demarcate the learning paths in a way that is consistent with the data.

scholarly journals Compensatory Lengthening in OT and DOT: Loss of Dorsal Fricatives in Middle
or Early Modern English

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Kleban
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Working Solution ◽  
Vowel Lengthening ◽  
Compensatory Lengthening ◽  
Lexical Phonology

The loss of dorsal fricatives in English held significant consequences for the adjacent tautosyllabic vowels, which underwent Compensatory Lengthening in order to preserve a syllable weight. While the process appears to be regular in descriptive terms, its evaluation handled within standard Optimality Theory highlights the ineffectiveness of the framework to parse both the segment deletion and two weight-related processes: Weight- by-Position and vowel lengthening due to mora preservation. As Optimality Theory has failed to analyse the data in a compelling manner, the introduction of derivation, benefitting from the legacy of Lexical Phonology, seems inevitable. The working solution is provided by Derivational Optimality Theory, which assumes a restrictive use of intermediate stages throughout the evaluation.

Phonology and Phonetics

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Michael J. Kenstowicz
Keyword(s):  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Phonological Variation ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Hiatus Resolution ◽  
Compensatory Lengthening ◽  
Nasal Consonant

This chapter focuses on the contributions African languages have made to phonological theory. The first section reviews some of the highlights in the development of autosegmental representations, concentrating on the interface of sound segments with prosodic structure. It is shown how one–many and many–one relations between phonemes and syllable positions elucidate the behavior of geminate consonants and the compensatory lengthening that accompanies processes of devocalization and prenasalization. The sections that follow consider the African contribution to studies concerning the scope and limits of phonological variation. Typologies of vowel harmony, vowel hiatus resolution and nasal-consonant coalescence, syllabification, reduplication, and phonological phrasing are surveyed.

Domain modelling in Optimality Theory: Morphophonological cyclicity vs. stepwise prosodic parsing

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-43
Author(s):  
KAROLINA BROŚ
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Input String ◽  
Domain Specificity ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Structure Building ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Chilean Spanish ◽  
Insight Into

This paper examines opaque examples of phrase-level phonology taken from Chilean Spanish under the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (OT) (Rubach 1997; Bermúdez-Otero 2003, 2019) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2008a, b, 2016). The data show an interesting double repair of the coda /s/ taking place at word edges. It is argued that Stratal OT is superior in modelling phonological processes that take place at the interface between morphology and phonology because it embraces cyclicity. Under this model, prosodic structure is built serially, level by level, and in accordance with the morphological structure of the input string. In this way, opacity at constituent edges can be solved. Stratal OT also provides insight into word-internal morphological structure and the domain-specificity of phonological processes. It is demonstrated that a distinction in this model is necessary between the word and the phrase levels, and between the stem and the word levels. As illustrated by the behaviour of Spanish nouns, affixation and the resultant alternations inform us about the domains to which both morphological and phonological processes should be assigned. Against this background, Harmonic Serialism embraces an apparently simpler recursive mechanism in which stepwise prosodic parsing can be incorporated. What is more, it offers insight into the nature of operations in OT, as well as into such problematic issues as structure building and directionality. Nevertheless, despite the model’s ability to solve various cases of opacity, the need to distinguish between two competing repairs makes HS fail when confronted with the Chilean data under examination.

scholarly journals Overtly Headed XPs and Irish Syntax-Prosody Mapping

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Kalivoda ◽  
Jennifer Bellik
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Left Edge ◽  
Relative Ranking ◽  
Irish Data ◽  
Theory Application ◽  
Match Theory ◽  
Constraint Ranking

Analyses of Irish phonological phrasing (Elfner 2012 et seq.) have been influential in shaping Match Theory (Selkirk 2011), an OT approach to mapping syntactic to prosodic structure. We solve two constraint ranking paradoxes concerning the relative ranking of Match and StrongStart. Irish data indicate that while XPs with silent heads can fail to map to phonological phrases in certain circumstances, overtly headed XPs cannot. They also indicate that rebracketing due to the constraint StrongStart occurs only sentence-initially, contrary to predictions. We account for these puzzles by invoking Van Handel's (2019) Match constraint which sees only XPs with overt heads, and by positing a new version of StrongStart which only applies to material at the left edge of the intonational phrase. Our analysis is developed using the Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory application (SPOT) and OTWorkplace.

scholarly journals AN OT ACCOUNT OF PHONOTACTIC AND CODA NEUTRALIZATION OF ENGLISH LOANS IN PILIBHIT HINDI-URDU

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-30
Author(s):  
Mohd Hamid Raza
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Basic Information ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Final Syllable ◽  
Speech Segments ◽  
Optimal Candidate

This paper provided the basic information of the phonological processes as the Coda Neutralization and Phonotactics of English Loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). The objectives of this paper were to represent the aspects of the coda neutralization in the sense of voiced obstruent segment becomes voiceless obstruent segment in the final syllable structure of the loanwords, and the consonant clusters break within the insertion of an extraneous segment in any location of the English Loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. In the another framework, this paper revealed the phenomena of devoicing features of coda consonants and the grades of the additional segments in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu loanwords within the principles of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). The central idea of this paper was to explore the process of conflicts between the candidates at the surface level and reflects the properties of the input candidate by the observation of the constraint rankings. In this study, it was propounded the effective formalities of the hierarchy of the constraint rankings and drew one of the best candidates as an optimal candidate out of the output candidates from English loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. The groundwork of this paper was related to the significant aspects of the English loans that were adapted within the addition, insertion, or deletion of the segments in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. In this paper, it was also determined the facts of the coda devoicing of the speech segments in terms of neutralization at the end of the syllable structure of English loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu.

Size, allomorphy and guttural-final stems in Modern Hebrew

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Faust
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Word Size ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
A Priority ◽  
Priority Relation ◽  
Ma Thesis ◽  
Two Alternatives ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract There is a tendency for syncretism between future and infinitive stems in Modern Hebrew. Verbs with final orthographic gutturals do not follow this trend in one verbal type. In another, they do follow it, but their exponent is different from that of regular verbs. Previous studies have claimed that (i) gutturals are represented in Modern Hebrew as a vowel /a/ (Faust, Noam. 2005. The fate of gutturals in Modern Hebrew. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University MA Thesis); (ii) Infinitives are derived in two cycles (Faust, Noam & Vered Silber-Varod. 2014. Distributed Morphology and prosody: The case of prepositions. In Burit Melnik (ed.), Proceedings of IATL29 (MITWPL 72), 71–92. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press); and (iii) stems seek to be no shorter than two syllables (e.g. Bat-El, Outi. 2003. The fate of the consonantal root and the binyan in Optimality Theory. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 32. 31–60.). Relying on these claims, an analysis is proposed involving two allomorphs with a priority relation. Phonological considerations of multiple correspondence, word size and cyclicity may nevertheless override the effect of priority, leading to the selection of the non-default allomorph. In the last section I briefly discuss two alternatives to the priority relation: the autosegmental alternative and the gradient alternative.

scholarly journals Clitics and Voicing in Dutch

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Jos Tellings
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Prosodic Structure

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper considers the interaction of voicing processes and clitic attachment in Dutch. This forms a challenge to phonological theories since clitic attachment shows opaque interaction with final devoicing, and in addition voice assimilation in cliticized structures is subject to variation. I propose a two-level Optimality Theory (OT) analysis (Prince and Smolensky 1993, Kiparsky 2000) of these data, in which the existence of two levels can han-dle the opaque interaction, and a combination of prosodic structure constraints and segmental constrains accounts for the attested variation.

Phonology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmood Bijankhan
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Loan Words ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
Feature Geometry ◽  
Natural Classes ◽  
Phonological Rules

This chapter reviews the organization of sounds in the contemporary Persian language and discusses the issues in phoneme inventory, syllable structure, distinctive features, phonological rules, rule interaction, and prosodic structure according to the framework of the derivational phonology. Laryngeal states responsible for contrast in pairs of homorganic stops and fricatives are different in Persian. Phonological status of continuancy is controversial for the uvular obstruent. Glottal stop is distinctive at the beginning of loan-words while not at the beginning of the original Persian words. Phonotactic constraints within the codas of the syllables violate the sonority sequencing principle. Glottals are moraic in the coda position. Feature geometry is posited on the sound distinctions and patterns within phonological processes. Eleven phonological rules are explained to suggest natural classes. Interaction of some rules is derived. Laryngeal conspiracy, syllable structure, and intersegmental processes are analysed according to interaction of ranked violable constraints of optimality theory.

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