The Incompatibility of Underspecification and Markedness in Optimality Theory

3 Place assimilation *

It is not difficult to derive place assimilation within the framework of previous theories such as classical generative theory, feature geometry, or underspecification theory. This is also true in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). For instance, if there is a markedness constraint of the type *HETERORGANICCLUSTER, and faithfulness constraints for place of articulation are ranked bel...

Contrast and Phonological Activity in the Nez Perce Vowel System*

0. Introduction Features that pattern as inert with respect to phonological processes are often unnecessary in distinguishing segments in an inventory. A natural way of accounting for the phonological inertness of noncontrastive features is via underspecification. If noncontrastive features are absent from underlying representations and barred from the phonology, it follows that they will not b...

Direct OT: Representation as Pure Markedness

This paper argues for a model of morphology and phonology in which phonological form is represented purely in terms of markedness rather than by strings of segments. The argument runs as follows: (i) underlying representations are prosodified; (ii) this makes them relatively ill-formed; (iii) so representations can be represented purely in terms of ill-formedness. Step (i) brings to its logical...

Optimality Of Monetary And Fiscal Policies In Iran: An Application Of The Stochastic Optimal Control Theory

Optimality Theory, markedness and second language syntax: the case of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses

Eckman, Fred R. 2004. Optimality Theory, markedness and second language syntax: the case of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 10.1. 89–110. This paper proposes a constraint-based analysis for what is arguably the most interesting phenomenon in second language (L2) syntax, the occurrence of an L2 error pattern where the regularity cannot be e...