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Publication Harmonic Serialism and Parallelism(2000-01-01) Mcarthy, John JPublication Quantitative Transfer in Reduplicative and Templatic Morphology(1988) McCarthy, John J; Prince, AlanSegmental quantity-the distinction between long and short vowels or geminate and simplex consonants-is preserved under specifiable conditions in reduplication. ’ Current nonlinear phonology holds, for a numberPublication Prosodic Boundaries in Adjunct Attachment(2001-01-01) Carlson, Katy; Clifton, Charles; Frazier, LynFive studies explored the processing of ambiguous sentences like Martin maintained that the CEO lied when the investigation started/at the start of the investigation. The central question was why particular prosodic boundaries have the effects they do. A written questionnaire provided baseline preferences and suggested that clausal adjuncts (when the investigation started) receive more high attachments than nonclausal adjuncts (at the start of the investigation). Four auditory studies manipulated the prosodic boundary before the adjunct clause and the prosodic boundary between the matrix clause and its complement. They disconfirm every version of an account where only the local boundary before the adjunct is important, whether the account is based on the acoustic magnitude of the boundary or its phonological type (an intermediate boundary characterized by the presence of a phrase accent vs. an intonational phrase boundary characterized by both a phrase accent and a boundary tone). Instead the results support use of the global prosodic context, especially the relative size of the local boundary and the distant boundary.Publication Integrating Lexical and Formal Sematics: Genitives, Relational Nouns, and Type-Shifting(1998) Partee, Barbara H; Borschev, VladimirIn this paper we discuss the analysis of expressions such as John’s team, John’s brother, John’s favorite movie, Mary’s favorite chair, Mary’s former mansion. Before introducing the concrete problems, we briefly describe our theoretical perspective. Our theoretical concern is the integration of formal semantics and lexical semantics, especially but not exclusively in the traditions of Montague Grammar and the Moscow School (Apresjan (1994), Mel’èuk (1982), Paducheva (1996)), respectively. We have proposed (Borschev and Partee (in press)) to modify the Moscow school approach and represent lexical information in the form of sets of meaning postulates, which may or may not exhaust the meaning of the given lexical item. We believe this use of meaning postulates is consistent with actual Moscow school practice, and it makes it possible to integrate lexical semantics with the compositional “semantics of syntax” given by formal semantics. If the formal semantic interpretation of a sentence is given as a formula of intensional logic in which lexical items are primitives, and lexical semantics as a set of meaning postulates for these lexical items, then their integration can be seen as the drawing of entailments from these sources. This approach is in principle extendable to the integration of semantic interpretation with contextual and other information as well. So we semantically represent a sentence or a text as a theory consisting of different sorts of formulas, i.e. different sorts of axioms and their entailments. By “theory” here, we do not mean the metalevel linguistic theory, but the set of axioms from various sources plus the consequences that can be drawn from these axioms, which together constitute the interpretation of such a sentence in a given context. Such a theory (see Borschev 1996) characterizes the class of all models that are consistent with the content of the given text, or of the text together with certain aspects of its context, if the theory includes axioms representing contextual information. The most general structure (features and constraints) of such models have to represent what the Moscow School calls “naivnaja kartina mira” ‘the naive picture of the world’, and what formal semanticists, following Bach (1986) and Link (1983), call Natural Language Metaphysics or Ontology. This general scheme, particularly the principles governing interactions among axioms from different sources, has to be investigated with concrete linguistic material. On our modeltheoretic perspective, all of the “axioms” from all of the different sources jointly constrain the possible models, and their joint effects may account for phenomena ranging from ambiguity reduction to meaning-shift phenomena such as “coercion”. On this view, cooccurrence restrictions reflect the sometimes incompatible demands that different elements may make on the interpretation of the whole. Ambiguities are decreased when not all of the possible variants provide a consistent (or sufficiently plausible) interpretation. Inconsistency, which should in principle always result in “anomaly” judgments, may lead instead to type shifting or other meaning shifts, the complexities of which are one of the main concerns of this paper. It will probably turn out that the mechanism of axiom interaction is rather complicated, and may include modifications (shifts) in some axioms in the context of the others. We do not pretend to have an articulated view of the nature of all the different sorts of axioms that may play a role in the “theory” of a text, but we will illustrate some of the possibilities for a few of them.Publication What is Optimality Theory?(2007-01-01) McCarthy, John JOptimality Theory is a general model of how grammars are structured. This article surveys the motivations for OT, its core principles, and the basics of analysis. It also addresses some frequently asked questions about this theory and offers suggestions for further reading.Publication What does comparative markedness explain, what should it explain, and how?(2003-01-01) McCarthy, John JThese seven commentaries treat a wide range of topics in interesting and insightful ways. It is not possible to write a coherent response that addresses all of the criticisms and suggestions, large and small, that the authors have brought up. Several main themes emerge, however, that transcend the individual commentaries, and these themes supply the structure for this reply. They include alternatives to comparative markedness, possible counterexamples, comparative markedness on other dimensions of correspondence, and questions about the authenticity of opaque phonological processes. These themes will each be addressed in turn.Publication Theoretical consequences of Montañes vowel harmony(1984) McCarthy, John JPublication The serial interaction of stress and syncope(2008-01-01) McCarthy, John JMany languages respect the generalization that some or all unstressed vowels are deleted. This generalization proves elusive in classic Optimality Theory, however. The source of the problem is classic OT’s parallel evaluation, which requires that the effects of stress assignment and syncope be optimized together. This article argues for a version of OT called Harmonic Serialism, in which the effects of stress assignment and syncope can and must be evaluated sequentially. The results are potentially applicable to other domains where process interaction is best understood in derivational terms.Publication Faithfulness and identity in prosodic morphology(1999) McCarthy, John J; Prince, AlanThis article is largely based on the more extensive study McCarthy & Prince (1995), but includes significant further analysis of the typology of reduplication-phonology interactions and new discussion of the connection between base-reduplicant identity and Generalized Template Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1994), which eliminates the template as a unitary linguistic object. Base-reduplicant Identity is accomplished through the same formal types of constraints as input-output Faithfulness, via the theory of correspondence (McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995), which provides a general means of regulating similarity between linguistic representations. Phenomena described as over- and under-application, where base-reduplicant identity effects come in conflict with and over-ride otherwise systematic phonological regularities, follow from the ranking of base-reduplicant identity constraints among the structural (markedness) constraints and input-output faithfulness constraints familiar from other work. One basic prediction is that under-application is not a primitive type of interaction. Another is that the base itself may be modified in order to increase identity, a kind of 'back-copying' that is unthinkable in most previous views of reduplication. Cases exemplifying this phenomenon are examined and shown to provide significant difficulties for serialist copying theories. It is proposed that all templatic effects come from the 'emergence of the unmarked' ranking pattern. The one irreducible fact about a reduplicative morpheme is its position in the morphological hierarchy (as affix, stem, etc.): from constraints on the morphology-prosody interface (e.g. Stem aligns with Prosodic Word) and from constraints on the realization of prosodic categories (e.g. Foot-Binarity), the shape requirements follow. It is shown that this view intriniscally limits the ways the base may copy the reduplicant: templatic requirements may never be back-copied to the base. The goal of the theory of Prosodic Morphology is to provide independent, general explanations for the properties of phenomena like reduplication, infixation, root-and-pattern morphology, observed word minima and other restrictions on canonical form. This article aims to contribute to that goal by developing the theory of reduplication from tools of wide applicability in linguistic analysis: correspondence, faithfulness, alignment.Publication The role of the evaluation metric in the acquisition of phonology(1981) McCarthy, John JThe Evaluation Metric of SPE, when taken seriously, produces some good results. Evidence comes from English, Spanish, and Maori.Publication The representation of consonant length in Hebrew(1981) McCarthy, John JGeminate integrity in Biblical Hebrew.Publication The prosody of phrase in Rotuman(2000-01-01) McCarthy, John JThe "phase" alternation in Rotuman is remarkable (and has attracted a good deal of previous attention) for two reasons. First, the shape differences between phases are quite diverse, involving resyllabification, deletion, umlaut, and metathesis. Second, the phase alternation produces prosodic structures that are otherwise unattested in this language, replacing simple (C)V syllables with closed and diphthongal ones. In this article, I argue that Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) helps to make sense of both these observations. I also go on to use these results to support some claims about the nature of templates and prosodic circumscription in the theory of Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1986).Publication The phonetics and phonology of Semitic pharyngeals(1994) McCarthy, John JThe guttural segments of the Semitic languages form a natural class.Publication The length of stem-final vowels in Colloquial Arabic(2005-01-01) McCarthy, John JThis paper has argued that richness of the base, when combined with OT’s inherent commitment to typology, leads to an improved understanding of problems of indeterminacy in underlying representations. The controversy over the length of Arabic final vowels, a controversy to which many analysts have contributed without a final resolution, disappears once the phenomena are examined from the perspective of ROTB and a typologically responsible CON. It has been suggested (M. Hale and Reiss 1998: 660) that “the notion of richness of the base [is] a computational curiosity of OT grammars that may be quite irrelevant to human language”. This analysis of Arabic shows, on the contrary, that ROTB is fundamental to the theory and inextricably linked with the results that OT can achieve.Publication The gradual path to cluster simplification(2008-01-01) McCarthy, John JWhen a medial consonant cluster is simplified by deletion or place assimilation, the first consonant is affected, but never the second one: /patka/ becomes [paka] and not *[pata]; /panpa/ becomes [pampa] and not [panta]. This article accounts for that observation within a derivational version of Optimality Theory called Harmonic Serialism. In Harmonic Serialism, the final output is reached by a series of derivational steps that gradually improve harmony. If there is no gradual, harmonically improving path from a given underlying representation to a given surface representation, this mapping is impossible in Harmonic Serialism, even if it would be allowed in classic Optimality Theory. In cluster simplification, deletion or Place assimilation is the second step in a derivation that begins with deleting Place features, and deleting Place features improves harmony only in coda position.Publication The P-Map in Harmonic Serialism(2009-01-01) McCarthy, John JAccording to the P-Map, a phonological mapping is less faithful to the extent that there is more perceptual distance between its input and output. Although this idea is attractive, it cannot be implemented in the standard parallel version of Optimality Theory. This note explains why and shows how a derivational version of OT, Harmonic Serialism, can solve this problem.Publication Template form in prosodic morphology(1993) McCarthy, John JA pre-OT analysis of the verbal templates in Akkadian and Arabic.Publication Taking a free ride in morphophonemic learning(2005-01-01) McCarthy, John JAs language learners begin to analyze morphologically complex words, they face the problem of projecting underlying representations from the morphophonemic alternations that they observe. Research on learnability in Optimality Theory has started to address this problem, and this article deals with one aspect of it. When alternation data tell the learner that some surface [B]s are derived from underlying /A/s, the learner will under certain conditions generalize by deriving all [B]s, even nonalternating ones, from /A/s. An adequate learning theory must therefore incorporate a procedure that allows nonalternating [B]s to take a «free ride» on the /A/ →[B] unfaithful map.Publication Synchronic rule inversion(1991) McCarthy, John JAn earlier analysis of r/zero alternations in the Boston dialect.Publication Prosodic circumscription in Choctaw morphology(1991) McCarthy, John J; Lombardi, Linda