Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T16:20:19.071Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Positional licensing, asymmetric trade-offs and gradient constraints in Harmonic Grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2018

Aaron Kaplan
Aaron Kaplan*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
*
E-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Harmonic Grammar, positional licensing interacts with faithfulness constraints in pathological ways: spreading a feature to a licensing position to satisfy positional licensing can incur many faithfulness violations, and if there are sufficiently many such violations, they gang up to block spreading. This problem is solved if positional licensing is recast as a positive constraint that rewards licensed features in proportion to the number of positions they are associated with, thereby countering faithfulness's multiple violations. This proposal provides support for positive constraints, calls into question arguments against gradient constraints and lays the groundwork for a sound theory of positional licensing in Harmonic Grammar.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 247 - 286
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

I am grateful to the following people for their insightful comments during the development of this work: Abby Kaplan, Wendell Kimper and Rachel Walker, and audiences at AMP 2015, the 37th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) and the University of Utah. Thanks also to an associate editor and three anonymous reviewers at Phonology, whose comments greatly improved this paper.

References

Baković, Eric (2000). Harmony, dominance and control. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Beckman, Jill N. (1999). Positional faithfulness: an Optimality Theoretic treatment of phonological asymmetries. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Cole, Jennifer & Kisseberth, Charles (1994). An optimal domains theory of harmony. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 24. 101–114.Google Scholar
Crosswhite, Katherine M. (2001). Vowel reduction in Optimality Theory. New York & London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eisner, Jason (1997a). FootForm decomposed: using primitive constraints in OT. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 31. 115–143.Google Scholar
Eisner, Jason (1997b). What constraints should OT allow? Handout from paper presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago. Available as ROA-204 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John A. (1989). Licensing, inalterability, and harmonic rule application. CLS 25:1. 145–156.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (2017). Varieties of Noisy Harmony Grammar. In Jesney, Karen, O'Hara, Charlie, Smith, Caitlin & Walker, Rachel (eds.) Proceedings of the 2016 Meeting on Phonology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v4i0.3997.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Londe, Zsuzsa Cziráky (2006). Stochastic phonological knowledge: the case of Hungarian vowel harmony. Phonology 23. 59–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. (1988). Underspecification and vowel height transfer in Esimbi. Phonology 5. 255–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itô, Junko (1986). Syllable theory in prosodic phonology. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Itô, Junko & Mester, Armin (1999). Realignment. In Kager, René, van der Hulst, Harry & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) The prosody–morphology interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 188–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jesney, Karen (2007). The locus of variation in weighted constraint grammars. Poster presented at the workshop ‘Variation, gradience and frequency in phonology’, Stanford University. Available (February 2018) at http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jesney/Jesney2007Variation.pdf.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen (2011). Licensing in multiple contexts: an argument for Harmonic Grammar. CLS 45:1. 287–301.Google Scholar
Jiménez, Jesús & Lloret, Maria-Rosa (2007). Andalusian vowel harmony: weak triggers and perceptibility. Paper presented at the workshop ‘Harmony in the languages of the Mediterranean’, 4th Old World Conference in Phonology, Rhodes. Handout available as ROA-901 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron (2008). Noniterativity is an emergent property of grammar. PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron (2011). Harmonic improvement without candidate chains in Chamorro. LI 42. 631–650.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron (2015). Maximal prominence and a theory of possible licensors. NLLT 33. 1235–1270.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Aaron (2017). Overshoot in positional licensing. Paper presented at the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) 2017, Boise State University. Handout available (February 2018) at https://linguistics.utah.edu/faculty/aaron_kaplan/Overshoot%20in%20Positional%20Licensing.pdf.Google Scholar
Kawahara, Shigeto (2008). On the proper treatment of non-crisp-edges. In Hudson, Mutsuko Endo, Jun, Sun-Ah, Sells, Peter, Clancy, Patricia M. & Iwasaki, Shoichi (eds.) Japanese/Korean linguistics. Vol. 13. Stanford: CSLI. 55–67.Google Scholar
Kimper, Wendell (2011). Competing triggers: transparency and opacity in vowel harmony. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.Google Scholar
Kimper, Wendell (2012). Harmony is myopic: reply to Walker 2010. LI 43. 301–309.Google Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Miyata, Yoshiro & Smolensky, Paul (1990). Harmonic Grammar: a formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic well-formedness: an application. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. 884–891.Google Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Sorace, Antonella & Smolensky, Paul (2006). The Optimality Theory–Harmonic Grammar connection. In Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine (eds.) The harmonic mind: from neural computation to optimality-theoretic grammar. Vol. 2: Linguistic and philosophical implications. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 339–402.Google Scholar
Lloret, Maria-Rosa & Jiménez, Jesús (2009). Un análisis óptimo de la armonía vocálica del andaluz. Verba 36. 293–325.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda (1994). Laryngeal features and laryngeal neutralization. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda (1998). Evidence for MaxFeature constraints from Japanese. University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics 7. 41–62. Available as ROA-247 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2003). OT constraints are categorical. Phonology 20. 75–138.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2004). Headed spans and autosegmental spreading. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Available as ROA-685 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2006). Restraint of analysis. In Baković, Eric, Itô, Junko & McCarthy, John J. (eds.) Wondering at the natural fecundity of things: essays in honor of Alan Prince. Santa Cruz: Linguistics Research Center. 213–239.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2008). The gradual path to cluster simplification. Phonology 25. 271–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2010). Autosegmental spreading in Optimality Theory. In Goldsmith, John A., Hume, Elizabeth & Wetzels, W. Leo (eds.) Tones and features. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 195–222.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1993). Generalized alignment. Yearbook of Morphology 1993. 79–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Andrew T. (2005). The effects of distance on lexical bias: sibilant harmony in Navajo compounds. MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
O'Hara, Charlie (2016). Harmony in Harmonic Grammar by reevaluating faithfulness. NELS 46:3. 71–84.Google Scholar
Parker, G. W. (1883). A concise grammar of the Malagasy language. London: Trübner.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (2009). Weighted constraints in generative linguistics. Cognitive Science 33. 999–1035.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pater, Joe, Bhatt, Rajesh & Potts, Chris (2007). Linguistic optimization. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Available as ROA-924 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Poppe, Nicholas (1954). Grammar of written Mongolian. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Poppe, Nicholas (1955). Introduction to Mongolian comparative studies. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). Model theory and the content of OT constraints. Phonology 19. 361–393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Alan (2003). Anything goes. In Honma, Takeru, Okazaki, Masao, Tabata, Toshiyuki & Tanaka, Shin-ichi (eds.) A new century of phonology and phonological theory: a Festschrift for Professor Shosuke Haraguchi on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Tokyo: Kaitakusha. 66–90.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri & Prince, Alan (1999). Optima. Ms, University College London & Rutgers University. Available as ROA-363 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri & Prince, Alan (2005). Fundamental properties of harmonic bounding. Ms, University College London & Rutgers University. Available as ROA-785 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Sanders, Benjamin P. (1998). The Eastern Andalusian vowel system: form and structure. Rivista di Linguistica 10. 109–135.Google Scholar
Stallcup, Kenneth L. (1980a). A brief account of nominal prefixes and vowel harmony in Esimbi. In Bouquiaux, Luc (ed.) L'expansion bantoue. Vol. 2. Paris: Société d’Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France. 435–441.Google Scholar
Stallcup, Kenneth L. (1980b). Noun classes in Esimbi. In Hyman, Larry M. (ed.) Noun classes in the Grassfields Bantu borderland. Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics 8. 139–153.Google Scholar
Staubs, Robert, Becker, Michael, Potts, Christopher, Pratt, Patrick, McCarthy, John J. & Pater, Joe (2010). OT-Help 2.0. Software package. http://people.umass.edu/othelp.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca (1995). Underspecification and markedness. In Goldsmith, John A. (ed.) The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell. 114–174.Google Scholar
Struijke, Caro (2000). Existential faithfulness: a study of reduplicative TETU, feature movement, and dissimilation. PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2001). Round licensing, harmony, and bisyllabic triggers in Altaic. NLLT 19. 827–878.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2004). Vowel feature licensing at a distance: evidence from northern Spanish language varieties. WCCFL 23. 773–786.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2005). Weak triggers in vowel harmony. NLLT 23. 917–989.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2010). Nonmyopic harmony and the nature of derivations. LI 41. 169–179.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2011). Vowel patterns in language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Colin (2003). Analyzing unbounded spreading with constraints: marks, targets, and derivations. Ms, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Zoll, Cheryl (1997). Conflicting directionality. Phonology 14. 263–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zoll, Cheryl (1998a). Parsing below the segment in a constraint-based framework. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Zoll, Cheryl (1998b). Positional asymmetries and licensing. Ms, MIT. Available as ROA-282 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Zymet, Jesse (2015). Distance-based decay in long-distance phonological processes. WCCFL 32. 72–81.Google Scholar