Remarks on URs-as-violations
Prosodic shape requirements for lexical items
These are taken to motivate 'underlying' syllabification, pedification
etc. across the board. Let's examine some ...
- Roots are monosyllabic: instead of reference to the syllable,
require 'forall roots: exists exactly one sonority peak'.
- Roots are bimoraic: assuming the previous shape req., 'forall
roots:exists >= 1 (virtual) sonority fall', with the concept of
virtual sonority resolving sonority plateaus such as long vowels-as-XX
positions (cf. Walther '92,'93,'95, found here).
The advantage of the above reformulations is that they steer clear of
non-monotonic resyllabification ("no non-structure-preserving behaviour").
- Requiring lexical items to have a certain
(minimal/maximal) shape is what linguists are after. A postulated
dichotomy between Underlying Representations (URs) and Surface
Representations is not necessarily connected to that issue!
- The lexical representation of (vowel) length by means of
two X/segmental positions does the job. Invoking moras for this
purpose is not necessary. The latter concept has been extensively
criticized by Noske (1992).
Given unordered syllable structure, strings are not always
predictable
German examples follow (additional linear precedence statements in brackets):
- t'icktack 'clock noise' vs T'aktik 'tactics' [tIktak],[taktIk] ( i
</> a)
- m'ono- 'deriv.prefix' vs. n'omo- 'deriv.prefix' (n </> m) ;
eg. in Monographie vs Nomographie
- K'ilo 'kilogramm' vs L'oki 'first name of wife of former chancellor
Schmidt' (o </> i, k </> l)
Also non-redundant linear precedence within coda (eg. Engl. Max vs task)
and onset (eg. Germ. Psalm vs Spitz, Northern NHG pronunciation).
Although finer classification of peripheral syllable roles using
pre/appendix constituents is possible, this looks artifical and
weakens the elegance of a unordered prosodic approach.
Prosodic underspecification and lexical shape are incompatible
To avoid resyllabification, one is tempted to leave alternating
'features'/prosodic roles underspecified or 'floating'. But to ensure
bimoraicity, say, in roots like aj, gam, paek the alternating
final consonant C (which will become an onset when V-initial suffixes
are added) must not be underspecified. This is because
bimoraicity needs to know C is in the rhyme, not in the onset,
to add to syllable weight. Morale: mononicity and lexical prosodic
shape constraints using prosodic constituents cannot both be satisfied.
Shape constraints may well be a complex statistical tendency
A parallel case involves alleged robust OCP effects on permissible
root consonant sequences in Arabic. Pierrehumbert(1993) has shown this
to be a statistical tendency only, revealing several subregularities
and exceptions. Hence it is most probably wrong to reflect this directly in
phonological grammar. So where are the large-corpora-based statistics
of shape constraints like the above, and what do they reveal?
Morphemes as constraints are needed anyway
Bolozky (1978:17-19) describes Modern Hebrew C/0 alternations confined to
single morphemes and minor rules affecting very small groups of
morphemes. These morphemes are regular w.r.t. to other grammatikal
processes such as inflection etc.
Now, in all-constraint theories like DP and OT it is natural to try
to cover all alternations with constraints, disregarding questions of
universality for now. OT is especially suited for this, since it was
expressly designed to cope with the except when case that arise
often in linguistic analysis (Prince & Smolensky:ch.4). The above
exceptional alternations in an otherwise regular setting is
the prototypical "except when" situation, hence should be dealt with
the mechanism that's already there, violable constraints plus ranking.
In effect, contra Prince (p.c.,optimality-list), OT being a
default-based formalism (Ellison 94) already has the mechanism to deal
with exceptions.
So what's so problematic about URs-as-violations?
- Most importantly,violation marks may simply not be
available! Prince & Smolensky do not clearly state them to be
a ontological primitive of OT like violable constraints, ranking or
defining solutions to be most harmonic. A very reasonable view takes
them to be mere graphical devices to convey constraint computation to
the linguist. Demanding violation marks to be "real" onotological
primitives forces specific technical implementation detail into OT,
hence pertains to OT performance or actual computation rather than OT
competence. Theoretical linguists commonly concentrate on compentence and leave
performance issues to implementors/CS people.
The fatal violation mark (!) in tableaux already is a device to
signal that there is no purpose in more constraint evaluation.
Optimizing implementations would take this into account or even
develop radically different modes of computing with OT, with no
guarantee of literal violation marks present at any level of the
system. URs-as-violations would prematurely preclude all such advanced
computational models of OT. It is difficult to see whether existing
proposals for OT computation (Ellison 1994, Tesar 1995) are compatible
with URs-as-violations: most likely they are not.
- "Grammars do not count" - so what about 7 *ONS or 13 *FILL as
crucial parts of URs-as-violations?
- If memorized violation patterns determine the identity of
morphemes, morpheme combination will normally create new and different
patterns, due to new syllabic roles, foot restructuring etc. Morpheme
recoverability or compositionality demands that the new violation
patterns be properly distinguished from UR-defining ones. This
is a diacritical distinction, probably for every mark, which might as
well be named +/- underlying or +/- derived. In fact, it's completely
unclear how morpheme combination should actually work in the technical sense.
- Speech is transmitted over a serial communications channel that
operates in space-time (this includes sign language), so linear order
comes for free in daily speech usage and acquisition. The most natural
strategy would seem to exploit this fact, matching performance linear
order with compentence representational content. Why deviate?
There would have to be extremely good reasons to not exploit linear order.
- Assuming one could elaborate on present proposals for
URs-as-violations to always recover string-based traditional UR's
including complete linear order from sets of violation patterns --
what would be the decisive advantage that cannot be achieved with
present OT machinery? That's hard to see given that OT is already a
powerful default system.
Markus Walther walther@ling.uni-duesseldorf.de