Since the creation of Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy and Prince 1993b/2001), it has been widely applied in various linguistic subdisciplines. OT was initially designed for phonology. Kager (1999:16) illustrates the fundamental assumptions of conventional OT with an example from Dutch (1). The symbol ‘-’ indicates a morpheme boundary and ‘.’ indicates a syllable...

This paper provides an analysis of scalar tone shift in Guébie as constraint-driven and morphosyntactically conditioned, rather than triggered by a particular abstract underlying representation. Much recent literature has claimed that all morphology involves affixation of morphemes with underlying (abstract) phonological representations (Benua 1997, Alderete 2001,Wolf 2007, Gouskova & Linzen 20...

The perennial fascination with the relationship between language and thought has generated much research across various disciplines. In recent years, commentators have called for closer examination of the connection between language acquisition and conceptual development (Bowerman & Levinson, 2001). Rather than assuming that language development always presupposes cognitive development, several...

Most morphological theories assume that a morphological change affects the meaning of a lexical item or indicates a specific relationship of the lexical item to some other lexical items in the utterance. Moreover, for item and arrangement morphology, most theories assume that a given morphological change may have only one lexical category in its scope. Most theories do not envision the existenc...

Leo Dorst and Rein van den Boomgaard Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] or [email protected] Abstract We extend morphology to tangential morphology of di erentiable surfaces, described by set-valued functions. We show that there is a preserved logarithmic inner product, and a standard basis of morph...

The article gives a brief summary of work dealing with morpho-syntactic phenomena in OT, and also addresses more general problems. It highlights on questions of optimal ordering, optimal case, and optimal agreeement, including phenomena such as morphological gaps, repairs and case-split. It finally addresses the concepts of stochastic OT and bidirectional OT. key words: bidirectional OT, candid...

Recent surveys have discovered hundreds of low surface brightness galaxies, systems with central surface brightness fainter than 22.0 B mag arcsec, in the local universe. Plots of the surface brightness distribution – that is, the space density of galaxies plotted against central surface brightness – show a flat space density distribution from the canonical Freeman value of 21.65 through the cu...