Alan Prince (Rutgers University) and Nazarré Merchant (Eckerd College)
Practicalities
This mini-course will consist of three meetings:
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Monday October 16th, 10:00-13:00
61 rue Pouchet, Paris 75017, room 311
Wednesday October 18th, 10:00-13:00
61 rue Pouchet, Paris 75017, room 311
Friday October 20th, 10:00-13:00
61 rue Pouchet, Paris 75017, room 311
These three meetings will be accessible also via the internet at https://rendez-vous.renater.fr/MerchantPrinceSeminar (preferably using Chrome). The program used to connect over Internet allows live interaction. This mini-course is introduced by a talk by Alan Prince on Friday 13th (see here for more information).
Abstract
(pdf available here)
The typology is the central object of OT. The practitioner sets up a particular system S = (S.Gen, S.Conn) that delimits the alternatives under consideration (S.Gen) and the constraints that evaluate them (S.Con). A system S will typically relate to some aspect of linguistic structure, but may be abstract or even nonlinguistic. Once S is defined, its ‘typology’ — the set of ‘grammars’ and ‘languages’ it admits — comes into existence as objects determined by the definition of optimality, which is fixed for all OT and only makes sense within an explicit system. Since using S to analyze even a single phenomenon within a single language typically requires understanding the typology of S, it is critical to understand how typologies are organized.
We therefore ask what kind of object a typology is, in itself. Grammars are based on the comparison of linguistic forms; an OT typology, we show, compares entire grammars over its set of constraints. From the details of this comparison, each constraint can be seen in its essential form as an order and equivalence structure on grammars. At this level, a constraint is no longer a function penalizing concrete linguistic structures and mappings, but a more abstract order and equivalence structure that we call an EPO, an 'Equivalence-augmented Privileged Order'. The collection of the EPOs, each one representing a single constraint, forms the MOAT, the 'Mother of All Tableaux'. The unique MOAT of a typology is instantiated in every violation tableau that gives rise to that typology.
With this characterization of 'typology' in hand, we pose and answer (or begin to answer) fundamental questions about the structure imposed by OT on its grammars.
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Typological Status. When does a given collection of grammars form a possible typology?
Classification. How do the grammars of a typology resemble and differ from each other?
Representation. What representations — graphical, geometric, tabular — provide the conceptual and practical tools for analyzing the structure of typologies?
To peak ahead somewhat opaquely, we observe that all of these are related to the fundamental result: a partition of the total orders on S.Con is a typology iff its MOAT is acyclic.
Overall goal: to establish the typology as a structured abstract object with several interrelated formal representations, to determine its basic properties, and to show their relevance to essential questions raised by the theory.
Detailed plan and handout:
The handout for Wednesday and Friday classes is available here.
References
Primary:
Merchant, N. and A. Prince. 2016. The Mother of all Tableaux. ROA-1285.
Immediate Background:
Prince, A. 2015. One Tableau Suffices. ROA-1250.
Magri, G. 2015. When is it the case that one tableau suffices? ROA-1253.
Merchant, N. 2012. Learning ranking information from unspecified overt forms using the Join. ROA-1146.
Merchant, N. and J. Riggle. 2015. Erc Sets and Antimatroids. ROA-1158.
Alber, B. and A. Prince. The Book of nGX. ROA-1312.
General Background:
Prince, A. 2016. What is OT? ROA-1271.
Prince, A. 2017. Representing OT Grammars. ROA-1309.
Ideological Background:
Prince, A. 2007. The Pursuit of Theory.