Festschrifts

The current effort will advance the notion that faithfulness to underlying structural relationships (Frel) may be relativized to homomorphemic strings only (HOMFrel). Under the appropriate ranking with markedness constraints this approach allows us to capture the facts of such phenomena as KPA much in the spirit of Kiparsky's original observation, that alternations may be blocked from application in non-derived environments, within a fully parallel OT.

This paper discusses the neutral vowels in Lokaa harmony, [i, u, {schwa}, a]. By neutral I mean a segment which has no harmonic counterpart. Such segments are either transparent or opaque. Lokaa harmony is important in three crucial respects. First, while it is rare to find a language which has both transparent and opaque vowels in its harmony, Lokaa does. The high vowels [i, u] are transparent to harmony; the low vowel [a] is opaque, and the status of the mid vowel schwa is indeterminate. Secondly, though Lokaa has an eight-vowel inventory the vowels [a] and schwa have not 're-paired' (Bakovic 2000, 2003). They do not alternate, as we find for example in the neighboring language Igede (Bergman 1971, Armstrong 1983), or in Wolof (Ka 1994) which has an identical vowel system. Thirdly, the historic ATR contrast found in Benue-Congo high vowels (Stewart 1971, Williamson 1973) shows up when high vowel stems take mid-vowel prefixes, though the high vowels can only be [+ATR] on the surface. That is, the ATR merger of high vowels in Lokaa is not complete.

This paper deals with Grassmann's and Bartholomae's Laws in Sanskrit. The former has the effect of distributing aspiration inside a root. The second accounts for the progressive assimilation of voicing and aspiration. Grassmann's Law, for example, is responsible for the alternation between bodh-ati '3rd sg. pres. ind' of the root /bhaudh/ 'know, wake' and bhot-sya-ti '3rd sg. fut'. In the former aspiration appears on the final consonant of the root while in the latter it appears on the initial consonant of the root. Grassmann's Law is intended to account for this migratory behavior. Bartholomae's Law, on the other hand, is intended to account for what happens in the form buddha 'past participle' from /bhudh + ta/ where in addition to progressive voicing assimilation, aspiration migrates from the root final consonant to the following consonant.

Optimality Theory is a theory of the economy of constraint violation. Can this property of the theory be exploited in our understanding of economy effects in general? Can economy of structure and movement be derived without reference to economy of structure and movement? The central idea of this paper is that the choice between filling positions by movement and filling positions with independent material is determined by markedness and faithfulness constraints. There is no 'economy of movement' constraint, just economy of movement effects. Economy of movement follows from the theory of what a chain is.

My goal is to argue the merits of a type of work that is somewhat rare in linguistics, and to illustrate this kind of work in three domains: phonological inventories and conjunctive constraint interaction, non-participating segments in vowel harmony, and the general nature of phonological categories like 'possible word of language L'.

Twenty years ago, I began a collaboration with Alan Prince that has dominated the course of my research ever since. Alan sent me a list of comments on a paper by James McClelland and David Rumelhart. Not only had Alan identified some important flaws in their model, but pinpointed the rationale for the mechanisms that linguists and cognitive scientists had always taken for granted and that McClelland and Rumelhart were challenging -- the armamentarium of lexical entries, structured representations, grammatical categories, symbol-manipulating rules, and modular organization that defined the symbol-manipulation approach to language and cognition. By pointing out the work that each of these assumptions did in explaining aspects of a single construction of language -- the English past tense -- Alan outlined a research program that could test the foundational assumptions of the dominant paradigm in cognitive science. My graduate advisor Roger Brown once decried the lack of progress in much of psychology owing to the phenomenon in which "a large quantity of frequently conflicting theory and data can become cognitively ugly and so repellent as to be swiftly deserted, its issues unresolved." I like to think that the past-tense debate, now in its third decade, is a more hopeful case, despite the impression in some observers that it has reached a stalemate. In this paper I summarize my view of the current state of the art.

The issue of whether language is the result of mechanisms that are specifically human, and specific to language, has been publicly discussed in a recent series of papers in Science and in Cognition. Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) and again in Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky (2005) argue that recursion is the only mechanism that qualifies on both counts, and they call this the Faculty of Language in the Narrow sense (FLN), in contrast to the Faculty of Language in the Broad sense (FLB). In the later 2005 paper, they say (p.200): "much of phonology is likely part of FLB, not FLN, either because phonological mechanisms are shared with other cognitive domains (notably music and dance), or because the relevant phenomena appear in other species, particularly bird and whale 'song'."

My goal in this squib is to ponder on what it is, as a phonologist, I would take to be core properties of phonological systems, and then ask which, if any, are known to be found outside humans, and which are known to be absent in at least some non-human animals.

Languages are replete with cases of lexical allomorphy. Their characteristic property is that the distribution of allomorphs is explicable on general phonological grounds, but no actual phonological rule exists in the grammar of the language that would derive both from the same underlying representation. In this note, we take up the two cases mentioned above, the historically matured allomorphy of the Latin noun-forming endings and the newly emerging allomorphy of the plurality marker in Japanese loanwords. From a variety of evidence characterized as 'prosodic trapping', Mester 1994 argues that the optimal foot structure of Latin is the bimoraic balanced trochee, ('LL) (two light syllables) or ('H) (one heavy syllable). Crucially, in a quantitative system, the unbalanced ('HL) and ('LH) do not qualify as trochees, and neither does ('L). In this restricted foot inventory, light syllables are often prosodically trapped initially: #L(H)..., and medially between heavy syllables: ...(H)L(H)....