MPhil Seminar: Evaluating OT

Lent 2007 · Bert Vaux

There has been general agreement in the rationalist climate of Chomskyan linguistics that a grammar is

a computational system inside the head of an individual speaker. The system with which all humans are endowed manipulates abstract symbols rather than more concrete entities such as phonetic sequences, as clearly shown by the ability of humans to create and acquire language in other modalities such as sign. As is well known, this abstract and formal model focuses on the internalized phonological competence of individual speakers. Since its inception the mentalist perspective on language has stood in opposition to reductionist and connectionist theories which maintain that language is driven by superficial but universal phenomena that refer only to the production and perception of directly observable phonetic elements. Such theories claim moreover that the structure of the human language faculty can be inferred from statistical generalizations over a subset of the world’s languages. In the last fourteen years these central tenets of reductionist linguistics—that language driven by universal constraints referring to surface representations, and that its structure can be deduced from statistical comparison—have risen to the forefront of theoretical phonology as part of Optimality Theory.  

In this seminar we examine the core structures of classic Chomskyan rule-based phonology (RBP; Kenstowicz 1993, Vaux 1998) and classic Optimality Theory (OT; Kager 1999, McCarthy 2002), focusing on identifying the classes of phenomena that each theory claims to be possible and impossible and comparing these predictions to what we know about attested and attestable languages. The main point will be that language arises from the confrontation of the human language acquisition device with the arbitrary linguistic data to which it is exposed; since these data encode layers of historical change, the resulting phonological grammar will be “unnatural” in the words of Anderson 1981 and Hyman 2000, incorporating crazy rules, opaque rule orderings, and the like. Unnatural systems of this type are accounted for most efficiently and insightfully in a Chomskyan rule-driven framework; existing OT implementations can be altered to account for at least some of the relevant phenomena, but only at the cost of abandoning the central theoretical tenets that have been claimed to give them the advantage over derivational theories. 

Goals of the seminar

  • Identify the main predictive differences between RBP and OT.
  • Evaluate the claims of superior descriptive and explanatory adequacy on each side of the debate.
  • Familiarize students with the central facts and concepts informing current and past debates concerning rules and derivations.
  • Learn what constitutes a good phonological argument, and how to develop and present one.
  • Formulate and defend an overarching argument for maintaining RBP and abandoning OT.

Required general readings (should be read as soon as possible)

  • Kager, René. 1999. Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • McCarthy, John. 2001. A thematic guide to Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • McMahon, April. 2000. Change, chance, and Optimality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
  • Vaux, Bert. 2007. Why the phonological component must be serial and rule-based. In Bert Vaux and Andrew Nevins, eds., Rules and constraints in contemporary theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Optional general readings

  • Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky. 2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. (Also available in earlier online form here)
  • Smolensky, Paul and Géraldine Legendre. 2006. The Harmonic Mind: From Neural Computation To Optimality-Theoretic Grammar, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Tesar, Bruce and Paul Smolensky. 2000. Learnability in Optimality Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schedule and specific readings

  • Readings for Week 1 should be done as soon as possible after the first lecture.
  • Readings for Week 2 should be completed before the lecture in Week 2, etc.
  • Click on underlined links to access online papers.

 week 1 Introduction to RBP and OT

  • Lecture (pdf) 
  • Hale, Mark and Charles Reiss. 2000. Substance abuse and dysfunctionalism: current trends in phonology. Linguistic Inquiry 31:157-169.
  • Hale, Mark, and Charles Reiss. 2000. Phonology as cognition. Phonological knowledge: Conceptual and empirical issues, ed. by Noel Burton-Roberts, Philip Carr, and Gerard Docherty, 161-184. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

week 2 Opacity

 week 3 Iterativity and the cycle

 week 4 Constraint: Ineffability, ROTB, and Morpheme Structure Constraints

 week 5 Optionality and variation

 week 6 Exceptionality

 week 7 L1/L2 Acquisition and learnability

 week 8 Universality, naturalness, and history

  • Anderson, Steve. 1981. Why phonology isn’t natural. Linguistic Inquiry 12:493-539.
  • Bach, Emmon and Robert Harms. 1972. How do languages get crazy rules? In R. Stockwell and R. Macaulay, eds., Linguistic change and generative theory, 1-21.
  • Halle, Morris and William Idsardi. 1997. r, Hypercorrection and the Elsewhere Condition. In Iggy Roca, ed., Derivations and constraints in phonology, 331-348. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Vaux, Bert. 2001. Consonant insertion and hypercorrection. Paper read at the LSA.

Contact: bv230@cam.ac.uk