Morphemes and Candidates in Optimality Theory
نویسنده
چکیده
signatures of Gen's inputs. McCarthy and Prince (1993a: 20) propose that the following three principles underlie the operation of the Gen procedure: 1. Freedom of Analysis. Any amount of structure may be posited. 2. Containment. No element may be literally removed from the input form. The input is thus contained in every candidate form. 3. Consistency of Exponence. No changes in the exponence of a phonologically-speci ed morpheme are permitted. (7) Some of the e ects of the principles that have been proposed governing the operation of Gen will be discussed in more depth in the next section. 1.3 Candidate Set Adjustment Unfortunately, these principles are not necessarily empirically correct in and of themselves. Gen, operating under the strictures of (7), might fail to produce a candidate set that contains the correct output form, the form that is empirically observed to exist in the language. McCarthy (1993a), for example, deals with the \linking r's" of an eastern Massachusetts dialect of English, which appear in phrases such as Wandar arrived . Given only the underlying representations of Wanda and arrived , McCarthy claims that Gen would not of its own free will produce candidates that contained the linking r , so he is forced to posit an ad hoc, language-particular \rule" that will increase the size of the candidate set to include the eventual winner and candidates similar to it. McCarthy (1993a: 190) elaborates somewhat on this operation: \Let us suppose that the grammar contains a phonological rule of r insertion: ; ! r. By a `rule' here I mean a phonologically arbitrary stipulation, one that is outside the system of Optimality. This rule is interpreted as de ning a candidate set fWanda, Wandarg, and this candidate set is submitted to the constraint hierarchy." But many questions remain unanswered: How and by what is the rule \interpreted as de ning" a new candidate set? How powerful is the interpreter? What kinds of rules can it understand? Can there be more than one such rule, and if so, how do they interact? The stage of the derivation where these kinds of operations take place are represented in (4) by the black box labelled Candidate Set Adjustment.
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تاریخ انتشار 1995