Optimality Theory and Spanish Phonology

Optionality and Gradience in Persian Phonology: An Optimality Treatment

The distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradient preferences. An organized survey was conducted to elicit the judgments of 37 native Persian speakers concerning the well-formedness of /?/allophonic behavior in five different phonological positions. The results showed that the differences in judgment between the various categories are not just t...

Spanish complex onsets and the phonetics–phonology interface*

This study analyzes cross-dialectal phonetic variation in Spanish complex onsets in light of recent work on the phonetics–phonology interface. Two basic patterns of obstruent-rhotic cluster realization, vowel intrusion and coarticulation-induced rhotic assibilation, receive a phonetically-motivated explanation in terms of the temporal coordination of consonantal gestures, within the framework o...

On Focus, Prosody, and Word Order in Argentinean Spanish: a Minimalist Ot Account

During the last decade, several proposals have been made for modeling focus-induced word order variation in Spanish, both in derivational and in optimality-theoretical frameworks. Furthermore, empirical studies have been carried out in order to capture the prosodic correlates of focus marking, most of them couched in the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology. Interestingly...

The Role of the Listener in the Historical Phonology of Spanish and Portuguese: an Optimality-theoretic Account

Optimality theory: Phonology, syntax, and acquisition

Optimality Theory (OT) shifts the focus of linguistic discovery from rules and derivations to constraints and rankings. It is a theory that has been most widely accepted in the realm of phonology, but has implications for all areas of linguistics. There are many linguists who accept OT while there are others who doubt its efficacy, especially with regard to providing a substantive theory of gra...