Towards Declarative Phonology

Sign-Based Morphology: A Declarative Theory of Phonology-Morphology Interleaving

[email protected] 2 Sign-Based Morphology: a declarative theory of phonology-morphology interleaving Cemil Orhan Orgun University of California, Berkeley 1. Setting the stage The issue: Is phonology-morphology interleaving derivational? When the issue of serialism is discussed, the issue of cyclic application of phonology is often not distinguished from rule ordering within a cycle, the...

Declarative Phonology

One-Level Phonology: Autosegmental Representations and Rules as Finite Automata

When phonological rules are regarded as declarative descriptions, it is possible to construct a model of phonology in which rules and representations are no longer distinguished and such procedural devices as rule-ordering are absent. In this paper we present a finite-state model of phonology in which automata are the descriptions and tapes (or strings) are the objects being described. This pro...

Optimality Theory

René Kager’s textbook is one of the first to cover Optimality Theory (OT), a declarative grammar framework that swiftly took over phonology after it was introduced by Prince, Smolensky, and McCarthy in 1993. OT reclaims traditional grammar’s ability to express surface generalizations (“syllables have onsets,” “no nasal+voiceless obstruent clusters”). Empirically, some surface generalizations ar...

Non-native Speech Learning in Older Adults

Though there is an extensive literature investigating the ability of younger adults to learn non-native phonology, including investigations into individual differences in younger adults' lexical tone learning, very little is known about older adults' ability to learn non-native phonology, including lexical tone. There are several reasons to suspect that older adults would use different learning...