Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T18:55:12.201Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Positional faithfulness in Harmonic Grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2018

MIRANDA MCCARVEL  and
AARON KAPLAN
MIRANDA MCCARVEL*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
AARON KAPLAN*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
*
Author’s address: University of Utah, Languages and Communication Building 255 S. Central Campus Drive Room 2300, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA[email protected]
Author’s address: University of Utah, Languages and Communication Building 255 S. Central Campus Drive Room 2300, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Tamil, coronals are licensed in onsets and initial syllables, exemplifying what Jesney (2011b) calls Licensing in Multiple Contexts (LMC). Jesney shows that while only positional faithfulness produces LMC in Optimality Theory, positional licensing provides a competing analysis of LMC in Harmonic Grammar (HG). This suggests that positional faithfulness may not be necessary in HG. We argue, though, that positional faithfulness remains essential. First, other facts in Tamil are incompatible with the positional licensing approach to LMC, rendering the positional faithfulness alternative the only viable analysis. Second, only with positional faithfulness can certain typological generalizations concerning assimilation between consonants be captured.

Keywords

Harmonic GrammarOptimality Theorypositional licensingpositional faithfulnessTamil
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , 01 February 2019 , pp. 123 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We would like to thank audiences at the University of Utah, Phonology 2013, NELS 44, and the 2014 Annual Meeting of the LSA for feedback on this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Linguistics whose feedback was invaluable. Abbreviations in glosses follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules. In addition, emphatic is abbreviated emph.

References

Ahn, Sang-Cheol. 1998. An introduction to Korean phonology. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
Akinlabi, Akinbiyi & Urua, Eno E.. 2003. Foot structure in the Ibibio verb. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 24.2, 119–160.Google Scholar
Archangeli, Diana. 1988. Underspecification in Yawelmani phonology and morphology. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Baković, Eric. 1999. Assimilation to the unmarked. Penn working papers in linguistics, vol. 6 1, 1–16. Philadelphia, PA: Deptartment of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Baković, Eric. 2000. Harmony, dominance, and control. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Barnes, Jonathan. 2006. Strength and weakness at the interface: Positional neutralization in phonetics and phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Beckman, Jill N. 1999. Positional faithfulness. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Berendsen, Egon. 1983. Final devoicing, assimilation, and subject clitics in Dutch. In Bennis, Hans, Van Lessen Kloeke, W U S & voor Taalwetenschap, Algemene Vereniging (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1983, 21–29. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Borowsky, Toni. 1986. Topics in the lexical phonology of English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachussets, Amherst.Google Scholar
Cho, Young-me Yu. 1988. Korean assimilation. In Borer, Hagit (ed.), Proceedings of the seventh West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 1988, 41–52. Stanford, CA: Stanford Linguistics Association.Google Scholar
Christdas, Prathima. 1988. The phonology and morphology of Tamil. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Chung, Sandra. 1983. Transderivational relationships in Chamorro phonology. Language 59, 35–66.Google Scholar
Crosswhite, Katherine. 2001. Vowel reduction in Optimality Theory. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Grijzenhout, Janet & Krämer, Martin. 2000. Final devoicing and voicing assimilation in Dutch derivation and cliticization. In Stiebels, Barbara & Wunderlich, Dieter (eds.), Lexicon in focus, 55–82. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2001. Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Hellberg, Staffan. 1974. Graphonomic rules in phonology: Studies in the expression component of Swedish. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio. 1989. Autosegmental and metrical spreading in the vowel-harmony systems of northwestern Spain. Linguistics 27, 773–805.Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio. 1998. Asturian and Cantabrian metaphony. Rivista di Linguistica 10.1, 99–108.Google Scholar
van der Hulst, Harry. 1980. On the formulation of phonological rules. In Daalder, Saskia, Gerritsen, Marinel & voor Taalwetenschap, Algemene Vereniging (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1980, 10–19. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M.2002. Is there a right-to-left bias in vowel harmony? Ms., UC Berkeley.Google Scholar
Ito, Junko. 1988. Syllable theory in prosodic phonology. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Iverson, Gregory K. & Kim, Kee-Ho. 1987. Underspecification and the hierarchical feature representation in Korean consonantal phonology. In Bosch, Anna, Need, Barbara & Schiller, Eric (eds.), The 3rd Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, vol. 2, 182–198. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen. 2011a. Cumulative constraint interaction in phonological acquisition and typology. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen. 2011b. Licensing in multiple contexts: An argument for Harmonic Grammar. In Bochnak, M. Ryan, Klecha, Peter, Lemieux, Alice, Nicola, Nassira, Urban, Jasmin & Weaver, Christina (eds.), The 45th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society  (CLS 45), vol. 1, 287–301. Chicago: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen. 2011c. Positional faithfulness, non-locality, and the Harmonic Serialism solution. In Lima, Suzi, Mullin, Kevin & Smith, Brian (eds.), the 39th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society  (NELS) 39, 429–440. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron. 2015a. Long-distance licensing in Harmonic Grammar. Presented at 37. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (37th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Linguistics), Leipzig, Germany, March 4.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron. 2015b. Long-distance licensing in Harmonic Grammar. Presented at the 2015 American Meeting on Phonology, Vancouver, BC, October 10.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron. 2015c. Maximal prominence and a theory of possible licensors. NLLT 33, 1235–1270.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron. To appear. Positional licensing, asymmetric trade-offs, and gradient constraints in Harmonic Grammar. Phonology.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron F. 2008a. Licensing and noniterative harmony in Lango. In Elfner, Emily & Walkow, Martin (eds.), NELS 37, vol. 1, 311–322.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron F.2008b. Noniterativity is an emergent property of grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Kimper, Wendell A.2011. Competing triggers: Transparency and opacity in vowel harmony. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusets, Amherst, MA.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. Lexical morphology and phonology. In Lee, Ik-Hwan (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm, 3–91. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
de Lacy, Paul V.2002. The formal expression of markedness. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Miyata, Yoshiro & Smolensky, Paul. 1990. Harmonic Grammar – a formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic well-formedness: An application. The Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 884–891. Cambridge, MA: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda. 1996. Restrictions on direction of voicing assimilation: An OT account. In Castillo, Juan Carlos, Miglio, Viola & Musolino, Julien (eds.), University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 4, 84–102. College Park, MD: Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda. 1999. Positional faithfulness and voicing assimilation in Optimality Theory. NLLT 17.2, 267–302.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda. 2001. Why place and voice are different: Constraint-specific alternations in Optimality Theory. In Lombardi, Linda (ed.), Segmental phonology in Optimality Theory: Constraints and representations, 13–45. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John. 2000. Harmonic serialism and parallelism. In Hirotani, Masako, Coetzee, Andries, Hall, Nancy & Kim, Ji yung (eds.), The North East Linguistics Society  (NELS), 501–524. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. 2008. The gradual path to cluster simplification. Phonology 25, 271–319.Google Scholar
Mey, Jacob. 1968. A case of assimilation in Modern Dutch. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 11, 123–145.Google Scholar
Mullin, Kevin. 2011. Strength in harmony systems: Trigger and directional asymmetries. [ROA-1134].Google Scholar
Neira Martínez, Jesús. 1955. El habla de Lena. Oveido: Instituto de Estudios Asturianos.Google Scholar
Neira Martínez, Jesús. 1983. La metafonia por /-i/ en los Bables centrales. Philologica hispaniensia in honorem M. Alvar, vol. I, 485–497. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Noonan, Michael. 1992. A grammar of Lango. Berlin, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Paradis, Carole & Pruent, Jean-Franc¸ois (eds.). 1991. The status of coronals: Internal and external evidence. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe. 2007. Harmonic Grammar with Harmonic Serialism. Handout from talk presented at UMass Amherst, November 7.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe. 2009. Weighted constraints in generative linguistics. Cognitive Science 33.6, 999–1035.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul. 1993/2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms., Rutgers University, New Brunswick and University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Blackwell, Malden, MA.Google Scholar
Ramasamy, Mohana Dass. 2010. Topics in the morphophonology of standard spoken Tamil (sst): An Optimality Theoretic study. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer L. 2005. Phonological augmentation in prominent positions. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul. 2006. Optimality in phonology II: Harmonic completeness, local constraint conjunction, and feature domain markedness. In Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine (eds.), The harmonic mind: From neural computation to Optimality-Theoretic grammar, vol. 2, chap. 14, 27–160. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine. 2006. The harmonic mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca. 1982. Greek prosidies and the nature of syllabification. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca. 2001. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation. In Hume, Elizabeth & Johnson, Keith (eds.), The role of speech perception in phonology, 220–250. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2000. Nasalization, neutral segments, and opacity effects. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2004. Vowel feature licensing at a distance: Evidence from northern Spanish language varieties. In Schmeiser, Benjamin, Chand, Vineeta, Kelleher, Ann & Rodriguez, Angelo J. (eds.), WCCFL, 787–800. Somervile, MA: Cascadilla.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2005. Weak triggers in vowel harmony. NLLT 23, 917–989.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2008. Gradualness and fell-swoop derivations. Handout from talk presented at the UCSC Alumni Conference, September 13.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2010. Nonmyopic harmony and the nature of derivations. Linguistic Inquiry 41.1, 169–179.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2011. Vowel patterns in language. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Woock, Edith Bavin & Noonan, Michael. 1979. Vowel harmony in Lango. In Clyne, Paul R., Hanks, William F. & Hofbauer, Carol L. (eds.), CLS. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Zoll, Cheryl. 1997. Conflicting directionality. Phonology 14, 263–286.Google Scholar
Zoll, Cheryl. 1998. Parsing below the segment in a constraint-based framework. Stanford, CA: CLSI Publications.Google Scholar