KATHERINE SHAW: Head Faithfulness in Lexical Blends: A Positional Approach to Blend Formation (Under the direction of Elliott Moreton) This thesis applies Positional Faithfulness theory (Beckman 1998) to the problem of lexical blending in English. Lexical blends, like brunch or motel, contract multiple source words into a single lexical item shaped by competing sets of phonological and psycholi...

Idempotency requires any phonotactically licit forms to be faithfully realized. Output-drivenness requires any discrepancies between underlying and output forms to be driven exclusively by phonotactics. Tesar (2013) and Magri (to appear) provide tight guarantees for OT output-drivenness and idempotency through conditions on the faithfulness constraints. This paper derives analogous faithfulness...

Recent research within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework (Prince & Smolensky 1993; McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1995) has suggested that domain-specific, or positional, faithfulness constraints play an important role in the grammar (e.g., Alderete 1995; Beckman 1995, 1998; Lombardi 1996; McCarthy & Prince 1995; Padgett 1995). This paper proposes that among the salient domains that have specific f...

Tesar’s (2014) notion of output-drivenness is an attempt at characterizing nonopaque phonological mappings in terms of a notion of phonological similarity between underlying and surface levels. Tesar defines phonological similarity concretely in terms of segment strings and correspondence relations. Magri (2017) instead defines similarity axiomatically through an inequality on faithfulness cons...

An idempotent phonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is show...

An idempotent phonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is show...

I consider some of the claims that have been made for and against the nature of the INPUT in OT syntax as developed within the assumptions of the Minimalist Program, leading to suggestions for further specification of the architecture of this approach. Comparing with the role of faithfulness in the OT approach developed from Lexical-Functional Grammar, I argue that specific linguistic analyses ...

The concepts of faithfulness and strong-faithfulness are important for statistical learning of graphical models. Graphs are not sufficient for describing the association structure of a discrete distribution. Hypergraphs representing hierarchical log-linearmodels are considered instead, and the concept of parametric (strong-)faithfulnesswith respect to a hypergraph is introduced. The strength of...

the changing of round and back vowel /u/ to unround and front vowel [i] occurs in lori dialects as well as some other persian dialects. this vowel change includes both unrounding and fronting. this paper aimed at coming up with an inclusive ranking of constraints to explain occurrence and nonoccurrence of this vowel change in various phonological environments in silahkori dialect within optimal...