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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Thursday, October 17, 5:30pm in 460-126:
Model theory and the content of OT constraints
Christopher Potts and Geoffrey K. Pullum, Department of Linguistics,
UC-Santa Cruz
We develop an extensible metalanguage for stating the content of
optimality-theoretic constraints on phonology, and specify a class of
structures for interpreting it. The aim is a transparent formalization of
OT constraints. Our proposal meshes well with recent work on constraint
ranking instigated by Karttunen and more fully developed by Samek-Lodovici
and Prince (SLP). We show how to state a wide range of constraints,
including markedness, input-output faithfulness, base-reduplicant
faithfulness, and paradigm uniformity. However, output-output
correspondence, sympathy, and targeted constraints are revealed to be
extremely problematic. It is unclear that any reasonable class of
structures can reconstruct their proponents' intentions. They are also
inconsistent with the developments of SLP. For the most part, the
problematic constraint types were developed to deal with opacity, which
therefore remains the most important theoretical crux for current OT. We
hope to shed new light on this debate, by subjecting some common
responses to it within OT to critical investigation.
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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