Virtually all the literature on French Schwa assumes that schwa deletion and epenthesis are categorical phenomena. This paper is an attempt to challenge this traditional view. After reviewing the evidence in favour of the non-categorical nature of (word-final) schwa, we propose a novel account framed within representational Optimality Theory (OT). It is argued that non-categorical schwa emerges...

Tesar (2013) develops the notion of output-drivenness, provides guarantees that OT grammars satisfy it, and demonstrates its learnability implications. This squib discusses the extension of Tesar’s theory to a representational framework with partial phonological features. It considers a hierarchy of notions of output-drivenness of increasing strength which can be defined within this extended fr...

for funding support. We thank the two anonymous referees, Rob Brown and workshop participants at Monash University, Clayton and AAANZ Conference 1997. We are grateful to Dean Hanlon for assistance with data collection and Dineli Mather for assistance with the design of the data base.

This article investigates the learnability filter (LF) hypothesis, according to which the set of logically possible grammars predicted by linguistic theory is reduced to a proper subset of learnable grammars by external principles of language learning. Anti-faithfulness constraints (Alderete, 2001a) provide a linguistic theory that predicts the existence of circular chain shifts of two segment ...

This study addresses the question of what basic principles and constraints govern blending while focusing on the description and analysis of phonological properties of Korean blends. Korean blending shows a systematic phonological word-formation process that usually preserves the prosodic structure of the head source word, while the initial part of the segmental sequence of the blend is from th...

The Correspondence model of base-reduplicant identity (McCarthy & Prince 1995, to appear) makes the prediction that any kind of segmental phonological process may result in any of these situations through ranking of phonological constraints with faithfulness constraints on the input and output and the basereduplicant relationship. Normal application arises when base-reduplicant faithfulness con...

It has been well argued that correlation does not imply causation. Is the converse true: does non-correlation imply non-causation, or more plainly, does causation imply correlation? Here we argue that this is a useful intuition of the semantic essence of the faithfulness assumption of causal graphs. Although the statement is intuitively reasonable, it is not categorically true (but it is true w...

This work is about two ‘generation problems’ for classic Optimality Theory, chain shifts and saltations. The issues OT posed by traditional analyses of saltations have led to various embellishments the theory, typically in form novel constraint types. Reiss (2021a,b) proposes a general solution problem that relies more directly on different assumptions representations than constraints. Specific...

Many algorithms for inferring causality rely heavily on the faithfulness assumption. The main justification for imposing this assumption is that the set of unfaithful distributions has Lebesgue measure zero, since it can be seen as a collection of hypersurfaces in a hypercube. However, due to sampling error the faithfulness condition alone is not sufficient for statistical estimation, and stron...