Morphological Markedness in an OT-Grammar: zeros and syncretism*

This paper explores the role of morphological markedness constraints in an OT framework with interleaving of phonological and morphological constraints. Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against the realization of marked combinations of features. For example, a constraint like *[+GROUP +RESTRICTED] (*DUAL) would penalize any output with a single morpheme realizing features [+group +restricted]. Similar types of constraints are proposed in Calabrese (2011), where they are called “marking statements”. However, Calabrese assumes that these constraints are absolute (if active) and that they operate during lexical insertion before phonology happens. Incorporating morphological markedness constraints into an OT grammar in which phonology and morphology are interleaved (possibly, in a serial manner) allows us to account for cases in which there is a tradeoff between phonological and morphological considerations favoring or banning zero morphology. Russian genitive plural (Gen-Pl) allomorphy is an example of such a case discussed in this paper. Additionally, morphological markedness constraints provide a way of capturing certain types of syncretisms through constraint interaction. These are syncretisms in which a morphologically marked cell in a paradigm under certain conditions is realized by an exponent which typically occurs in other less marked contexts (such cases are described as Impoverishment on alternative accounts). Finally, morphological markedness constraints can also be thought of as restricting over time the range of morphological contrasts that are made in a language. The paper is organized as follows. First I present some background assumptions of an OT-model that handles both lexical insertion and phonological computation. Then I present a portion of the analysis of Russian Gen-Pl allomorphy demonstrating the interactions between phonological and morphological markedness. Finally, I use morphological markedness to analyze an example of Impoverishment in OT.