This is because the former are lexically implicated or entailed, and thus are more available and less expensive than the latter in the sense that they involve less practical reasoning. In addition, in terms of the strong-weak distinction, an implicational universal can be posited, namely that if a language has strong resultatives, it must have weak resultatives as well (Washio 1999, 2002). Seco...

1. Introduction Grammatical gender is rare across Amazonian languages. The language families that possess grammatical gender properties are Arawak, Chapakuran and Arawá. Wari', a Chapakuran (Txapakura) language of Brazil, is unusual among these languages in that it possesses three gender categories: what we can refer to as masculine, feminine and neuter. While efforts have been made to posit th...

Results are reported from a descriptive and experimental study that was intended to evaluate comparative markedness (McCarthy 2002, 2003) as an amendment to optimality theory. Two children (aged 4;3 and 4;11) with strikingly similar, delayed phonologies presented with two independent, interacting error patterns of special interest, i.e., Deaffrication ([tɪn] 'chin') and Consonant Harmony ([ɡɔɡ]...

This paper provides an analysis of the typologically unusual patterns of case assignment in Tlapanec. The theoretical approach relies on a sub-analysis of the markers and on postulating an interaction of markedness constraints. These constraints are implemented in a more general concept of grammar in which morphology applies after syntax, as is the case in Distributed Morphology. According to t...

This paper examines the contributions of markedness and a child's grammar to the process of lexical diffusion in phonological acquisition. Archival data from 19 preschoolers with functional phonological delays were submitted to descriptive analyses of productive sound change in fricatives. Children's presenting fricative inventory, the fricatives newly learned, and their position of occurrence ...

In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in over 30 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued ...

English. In this work, we will investigate whether and to what extent algorithms typically used to assess the reliability of the output of syntactic parsers can be used to study the correlation between processing complexity and the linguistic notion of markedness. Although still preliminary, achieved results show the key role of features such as dependency direction and length in defining the m...

The present article examines the changes that affect stressed vowels in the nativization of loanwords into Standard German, e.g. laxing of vowels like [i] to [i] in Ffijrma (< Italian Ffijrma). An Optimality-Theoretic treatment (Prince & Smolensky 1993) of the loanword data is proposed in which the nativization process is accounted for by ranking two MARKEDNESS constraints ahead of two FAITH co...

Cases of ATR harmony are numerous and widely documented in the literature, whereas languages in which RTR is harmonically active (e.g. Wolof) have received a good deal less attention. A description based on the bivalent feature [±ATR] is capable of representing both harmony types, but fails to encode naturally the clear difference in typological markedness separating the two. On the other hand,...