Nonlocal Reduplication

Marantz (1982) observed that reduplicative affixes generally copy the string of segments beginning with the edge to which the affix is attached and proceeding into the word. Though Marantz described ‘edge-in association’ as a tendency, many subsequent researchers have (at least tacitly) taken it to be an inviolable principle in reduplication (e.g. McCarthy and Prince 1996, Kager 1999, Nelson 2003 and others). This assumption is incompatible with the existence of nonlocal patterns of reduplication where unreduplicated surface material intervenes between the two surface copies.To maintain the inviolability of edge-in association such patterns must be analyzed as showing covert locality or as non-instances of reduplication. On the other hand, if edge-in association is merely a tendency, nonlocal reduplicative patterns can be given a straightforward analysis with locality constraints and a relaxed definition of the ‘base’ -the string the reduplicant is obliged to copy. (1) The base generalized: Everything in the output that isn’t the reduplicant is the base. (2) LOCALITY: No segment that isn’t itself in the correspondence relation M1 R M2 may intervene between two segments corresponding via R.– One mark is assigned per segment y that lies between x and x' in S where x R x', unless there's a y' in S and y R y'. LOCALITY says that only segments that are themselves in B/R-correspondence may separate corresponding elements in the base and reduplicant. Under the generalized definition of basehood, reduplicant placement will be determined solely by LOCALITY and the constraints generally responsible for affix placement (e.g. ALIGN). Reduplicant content can then be determined by B/R-MAX constraints indexed to salient elements like stems, edges, and stressed syllables. These constraints generate a typology of reduplication that includes nonlocal patterns like the ones in Koryak and Creek but is overwhelmingly composed of reduplicative patterns that obey Marantz’s generalization.The definitive version of this paper was published in NELS 34: Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society (2004) and is available at http://glsa.hypermart.net

Using Entropy to Learn OT Grammars From Surface Forms Alone

The problem of ranking a set of constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) i