In the 1970’s the approach of Natural Phonology focused on the observation that phonetically motivated (“natural”) processes are common in the phonologies of the world’s languages, while phonetically unmotivated (“unnatural”) ones are uncommon (cf. Stampe 1969, Vennemann 1974, Hooper 1976, Donegan and Stampe 1979; for reactions at the time see, for example, Hellberg 1978 and Anderson 1981). Muc...

Idsardi (2006) claims that Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004) is ‘‘in general computationally intractable’’ on the basis of a proof adapted from Eisner 1997a. We take issue with this conclusion on two grounds. First, the intractability result holds only in cases where the constraint set is not fixed in advance (contra usual definitions of OT), and second, the result crucial...

Given a linguistic theory with constraints/parameters/rules of any generality, learners are faced with what Dresher (1999) calls the credit problem. In terms of Optimality Theory (OT: Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), there is usually more than one constraint that favors an optimal form over any one of its competitors, and that can be ranked by the learner over the constraints preferring the com...

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalizing marked structure, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). An account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual 'repairs' to structure...

This paper is an attempt to determine the underpinnings of Optimality Theory (henceforth OT; Prince and Smolensky, 1993; McCarthy and Prince, 1993), and what logic might have to do with it.1 This is important because, without this kind of work, very strange misunderstandings of the theory crop up. The work reported here is preliminary, but nothing of this sort has previously been attempted for ...

I argue that this kind of nasal harmony comes about through a correspondence relation between Cs in a word rather than resulting from feature spreading. This proposal will be important in explaining the characteristics in (1) and also the neutrality of ‘prenasal’ NC complexes in the language. From a broader perspective, this approach has the potential to extend to other segmental harmonies that...

Reanalyzing production data from three French children, we make three basic points. First, we show that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Tense production starts and ends at near-adult levels, but suffers a “dip” in production at the second stage. Agreement develops linearly, going roughly from none to 100% over the same time. This profi...