Co-phonology vs. Indexed constraint theory: a case study of Perak dialect partial reduplication

This paper presents co-phonologies and indexed constraint theory developed within Optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) to account for partial reduplication in Perak dialect of Malay. It is found that the dialect has two patterns of reduplicative morphemes, i.e. light and heavy reduplication. In the co-phonology developed by Orgun (1996), Antilla (2002), Inkelas and Zoll (2005, 2007) and many others, each morphological construction is associated with a different phonological grammar, and the idea of ‘Markedness Reversal’, where a markedness constraint can be re-ranked in different morphological constructions in the same language, is used to account for morphologically conditioned phonology. In indexed constraint theory on the other hand, one constraint ranking is used to define the grammar of the entire language (cf. Alderrete,1999, 2001; Itô and Mester, 1999, 2003). Unlike co-phonology, this theory handles morphologically-conditioned phonology cases by splitting the phonology constraints into a particular morphological context, which results in different indexed versions, such as MAX-CROOT, MAX-CAFFIX and so forth (Ibid.). In the analysis, I will demonstrate how the ideas proposed in both theories can handle light and heavy reduplication. The results of the analysis favour co-phonology rather than indexed constraint theory, as the former offers a better account of morphologically conditioned phonology.Australian National Universit

Exploring the focus-morphology interface: morpho-syntactic aspects of non prosodic focus : Selected Proceedings of the 2007 Mid American Linguistics Conference

This paper claims that a constraint-based theory (i.e, OT) can best account for the many manifestations of Focus in typologically diverse languages. We propose an interaction between Discourse Representation Theory (hereafter DRT) (Kamp, 1981; Kamp and Reyle, 1993) and Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) to best account for these facts, maintaining that constraint-ranking is the best way to achieve a descriptive and explanatorily adequate analysis of natural data. In particular, we provide a novel sketch of a theoretical account of natural languages that mark Focus morphologically but not prosodicall

Spanish epenthesis: Formal and performance perspectives

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Remarks on the architecture of OT syntax grammars

This paper argues for a particular architecture of OT syntax. This architecture hasthree core features: i) it is bidirectional, the usual production-oriented optimisation (called ‘first optimisation’ here) is accompanied by a second step that checks the recoverability of an underlying form; ii) this underlying form already contains a full-fledged syntactic specification; iii) especially the procedure checking for recoverability makes crucial use of semantic and pragmatic factors. The first section motivates the basic architecture. The second section shows with two examples, how contextual factors are integrated. The third section examines its implications for learning theory, and the fourth section concludes with a broader discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed model

Free relative constructions in OT syntax

This paper is part of a research project on OT Syntax and the typology of the free relative (FR) construction. It concentrates on the details of an OT analysis and some of its consequences for OT syntax. I will not present a general discussion of the phenomenon and the many controversial issues it is famous for in generative syntax