The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun:Chichewa Pronominals in OT

In Optimality Theory a grammar consists of a ranking of constraints which are i universal and ii violable. Languages diier systematically only in their rankings of these constraints Prince and Smolensky 1993. The latter is a powerful theoretical principle which plays a central role in the explanatory scope of OT Smolensky 1996a,b, its learnability T esar and Smolensky 1996 and its consequences for linguistic typology e.g. Legendre, Raymond, and Smolensky 1993. It is sometimes referred to as richness of the base. According to the principle of richness of the base, systematic diierences in the lexical inventories of languages cannot simply be derived from language-particular constraints on lexical features or morphology. All such diierences must derive from the rerankings of universal constraints. From the perspective of generative syntax, however, this consequence initially seems implausible, even absurd: after all, it has now been almost universally accepted that much of syntax derives from the lexicon, but the lexicon itself has been regarded as the residual core of what cannot be predicted. In defence of this view it is often observed that the inventory of forms present in each language reeects a contingent and individual path of historical change and areal contact. Previous OT syntax work on deriving the lexicon e. Romance clitics does not explicitly address the issues of contingency and markedness taken up here. While the contingency of the lexicon is inescapable, both phonologists and functional linguists have recognized that linguistic inventories also reeect universal patterns of markedness and are often functionally motivated by perceptual and cognitive constraints. I will argue in support of this conclusion by showing how diierent inventories of personal pronouns across languages may be formally derived by the prioritizing of motivated constraints in Optimal-ity Theory. The contingency of the lexicon|exempliied by accidental lexical