differential adpositional case marking in vafsi within optimality theory

Variation within Optimality Theory

In Optimality Theory, an important tool for accounting for morpho-phonological processes is output-output correspondence. A development of this approach is Transderivational Anti-Faithfulness (TAF), constituting a reversal of faithfulness. This article will explore the nature of TAF, in order to test this approach as an extension of Optimality Theory. The example of morphologically triggered ac...

Animacy and asymmetries in differential case marking

The present paper presents a cross-linguistic overview of animacy effects in (differential) case marking, and provides an explanation for the attested patterns in terms of two competing case marking strategies. It is argued that the complexity of animacy effects in differential case marking is due to the fact that some of these patterns result from the differentiating function of case marking, ...

A Computational Treatment of Differential Case Marking in Malayalam

Case is often treated as an uninteresting part of computational processing (both parsing and generation). In the mainly free word order South Asian languages, case plays a theoretically well established role in syntactic and semantic processing. Case is used not only to help identify grammatical relations (e.g., ergatives indicate subjects), but also contributes significantly to the semantic an...

Proto-Roles and Case Selection in Optimality Theory

Learnability in Optimality Theory

In this article we show how Optimality Theory yields a highly general Constraint Demotion principle for grammar learning. The resulting learning procedure specifically exploits the grammatical structure of Optimality Theory, independent of the content of substantive constraints defining any given grammatical module. We decompose the learning problem and present formal results for a central subp...

Optimality Theory in Phonology

GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY [q.v.] aims to construct a predictive theory of natural language sound systems, rooted in a finely-detailed account of the principles defining linguistic representations and the possible relations between them. Within these broad goals, OPTIMALITY THEORY (OT) develops in the context of specific empirical theses about the way phonological systems are organized. We identify t...