Stanford LINGUIST 210B - GRADIENT PHONOTACTICS IN OPTIMALITY THEORY

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GRADIENT PHONOTACTICS IN OPTIMALITY THEORY ABSTRACT: Lexical items can be more or less well-formed depending on the phoneme combinations they contain. This phenomenon is called gradient phonotactics. We propose that the relative well-formedness of a phoneme combination is inversely correlated with its grammatical complexity defined in terms of optimality-theoretic ranking information and show that this hypothesis is supported by phonotactic data from Muna (Austronesian). We conclude that gradient phonotactics does not require new theoretical devices, such as gradient constraints, but follows from the elementary notions of Optimality Theory: constraints, rankings, and relations among rankings. 1. INTRODUCTION PHONOTACTICS is the study of permissible and impermissible phoneme combinations in a language. It has often been noted that phonotactic principles appear to be GRADIENT: lexical items can be more or less well-formed depending on the phoneme combinations they contain. The gradience of phonotactics emerges in at least two ways. First, some types of lexical items are statistically overrepresented, others statistically underrepresented, depending on their phonotactic structure. For example, in Arabic, there is a well-known dissimilatory constraint against homorganic consonants in adjacent positions within the verbal root (Frisch, Pierrehumbert, and Broe 2004; Greenberg 1950; McCarthy 1988, 1994; Pater and Coetzee 2005; Pierrehumbert 1993): the more similar the consonants are, the less commonly they co-occur in actual lexical items. For similar gradient generalizations in other languages, see e.g. Berkley 1994a, 1994b, 2000; Coleman and Pierrehumbert 1997; Hammond 2004; Hay, Pierrehumbert, and Beckman 2004 (English); Coetzee and Pater 2006; Pater and Coetzee 2005 (Muna). Second, it has been observed that novel words (“wug words”) show gradient acceptability that depends on their phonotactic structure. Thus, speakers of English judge nonsense words like stin to be rather good, smy to be less good, and bzarshk to be rather bad (Albright 2006). For similar effects, see Bailey and Hahn 2001; Coleman and Pierrehumbert 1997; Frisch, Large, and Pisoni 2000; Frisch and Zawaydeh 2001; Greenberg and Jenkins 1964; Ohala and Ohala 1986; Vitevitch, Luce, Charles-Luce, and Kemmerer 1997, among others. Gradient phonotactic generalizations are a challenge for phonological theory. Nevertheless, they have attracted relatively little attention from phonologists. How should such generalizations be explained? There are two main possibilities. The first possibility is a GRAMMATICAL EXPLANATION: phonological grammars are formalized in such a way as to predict the relative likelihoods of segment combinations in terms of their relative markedness, perhaps stated over natural classes. Some segment combinations would be so ill-formed as to end up being absolutely ungrammatical, while others would be more or less grammatical along different dimensions of markedness. The second possibility is a LEXICAL EXPLANATION: gradient judgments arise by consulting the lexicon. On this view, a novel word would derive support from existing words depending on the number of its 1lexical neighbors, defined in terms of e.g. string edit distance (Kruskal 1983), which may be weighted by lexical token frequency, similarity, etc. An extreme version of such a model would deny the phonological grammar any role in gradient well-formedness judgments. The speakers would simply consult the existing lexical items in judging the well-formedness of novel words, not abstract markedness relations stated over combinations of natural classes. It is likely that a successful explanation of gradient phonotactics will ultimately involve both grammatical and lexical factors. The best approach seems to be to develop explicit theories of both types and try to figure out what kind of division of labor is empirically justified. In this paper, we will pursue a grammatical explanation of gradient phonotactics based on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). Our goal is to derive the relative well-formedness of phonotactic combinations from a grammar based on ranked and violable constraints. Our proposal is that the relative well-formedness of a phonotactic combination depends on its grammatical complexity in the following sense: the more ranking information a phonological mapping requires, the less well-formed it is. We call this the COMPLEXITY HYPOTHESIS: (1) The Complexity Hypothesis: The probability of an <input, output> mapping is inversely correlated with its grammatical complexity. We show that the Complexity Hypothesis is consistent with the gradient phonotactic facts of Muna (Austronesian), recently studied by Coetzee and Pater (2006). The results support the view that gradient phonotactics is part of the phonological grammar, not just a by-product of lexical frequencies. The present paper draws upon two lines of recent optimality-theoretic research. Our proposal is indebted to Pater and Coetzee’s work on gradient phonotactics (Coetzee and Pater 2006, Pater and Coetzee 2005). We build on their insights, but develop them in a very different direction. While working on this project, I have become aware of Prince’s work on Elementary Ranking Conditions (Prince 2002a, 2002b, 2006a, 2006b). This work seeks to determine the necessary and sufficient ranking conditions for phonological mappings and the entailments among these conditions. The present paper provides a concrete illustration of the relevance and usefulness of these notions in empirical work. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we introduce our proposal and illustrate it based on a simple example from Arabic. In section 3, we discuss the gradient phonotactics of Muna. Section 4 concludes the paper. 2. THE PROPOSAL 2.1 The Arabic example In Arabic, root morphemes are normally composed of three consonants, e.g. ktb ‘write’. There is a well-known dissimilatory constraint against homorganic consonants in adjacent positions within the verbal root (Frisch, Pierrehumbert, and Broe 2004; Greenberg 1950; McCarthy 1988, 1994; Pater and Coetzee 2005; Pierrehumbert 1993). For example, root morphemes with adjacent labial consonants (*fbm, *bfk, *kbm) are ill- 2formed (McCarthy 1988:88). However, it is also well known that the pattern shows gradience. Frisch, Pierrehumbert and Broe (2004) argue that the strength of the dissimilatory effect is


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Stanford LINGUIST 210B - GRADIENT PHONOTACTICS IN OPTIMALITY THEORY

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