This paper provides an analysis of the reduplicative patterns of Kavalan, an endangered Formosan plains tribe language spoken by fewer than one hundred people on the eastern coast of Taiwan. Kavalan reduplication is special in that the reduplicant takes several distinct shapes depending on the initial syllable of the base (Lee 2009). Within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky...

Ohala and Ohala (1986) present experimental results that are problematic for Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) model of phonotactic knowledge. They point out that the SPE theory does not distinguish between a word with one ill-formed structure and a word with multiple instances of ill-formedness. Cumulative ill-formedness equally plays no role in standard Optimality Theory (OT: Prince and Smolensky 20...

Since Kiparsky (1968) it has been standard practice in generative phonology to account for sound change by means of rule addition, rule simplification, rule reordering and rule loss. Given that the phonological rule as such no longer exists in recently proposed constraint-based theories of phonology, such as Optimality Theory (cf. Prince and Smolensky (1993), McCarthy and Prince (1993a and b), ...

this paper aims at describing the mechanism of german loanwords adaptation with respect to constraints of persian language and within ot framework. consequently the adaptation of consonant clusters and diphthongs as well as the phonemes substituted in loanwords will be examined. prince and smolensky’s (1993) optimality theory with its key notions of faithfulness and markedness constraints is su...

Previous work (Frank and Satta, 1998; Karttunen, 1998) has shown that Optimality Theory with gradient constraints generally is not finite state. A new finite-state treatment of gradient constraints is presented which improves upon the approximation of Karttunen (1998). The method turns out to be exact, and very compact, for the syllabification analysis of Prince and Smolensky (1993).

In this chapter we present the initial stages of work that attempts to assess the ‘psychological reality’ of one of the more subtle grammatical principles of Optimality Theory (‘OT’; Prince and Smolensky 1993), Richness of the Base. Within the OT competence theory, we develop several of this principle’s empirical predictions concerning the grammar’s final state (Section 1) and initial state (Se...

In the present analysis, we argue that the canonical difference between Moroccan Arabic triliteral nouns and verbs can be explained by invoking the active role of an alignment and a sonority condition constraint. We attempt to clarify the issue by arguing that an examination of the perfective inflectional paradigm of sound triliteral verbs can provide hints about the difference in behavior exhi...