Chris Golston

DIRECT OPTIMALITY THEORY : REPRESENTATION AS PURE MARKEDNESS

I present a model of phonological representation which represents morphemes in terms of constraint violations rather than strings of segments or root nodes. The formalism allows representation to be uniform throughout the phonology, mandates permanent underspecification of unmarked structure, derives the linear order of segments within a morpheme, and allows representation and evaluation to be conflated. Marked types of morphology (infixes, circumfixes, zero affixes; subtractive, reduplicative and templatic morphology) are represented in exactly the same way as roots. The markedness of such morphology is argued to follow from the high ranking of the violated constraints in question. *

Syntax outranks phonology: evidence from Ancient Greek

What influence do syntax and phonology have on one another ? Two types of answer to this question appear in the literature. The consensus view is probably best expressed by Zwicky & Pullum (1986) (see also Myers 1987; Vogel & Kenesei 1990), who claim that the relation is one-way: although phonological phrasing above the word is affected by syntactic structure, syntax itself is phonology-free.

Constraint-Based Metrics

This paper offers an analysis of Middle English Alliterative Verse in terms of Prosodic Metrics (Golston and Riad 1995, 1997a, b, 1998) using the ranked and violable constraints of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The analysis uses purely phonological constraints without recourse to language-specific or meter-specific constraints and without an abstract metrical template (Helsloot 1997). I show that the number of tokens per metrical type correlates with phonological well-formedness in one of five areas: binarity, weight, alignment, identity, and rhythm. In addition, I show that poems written in this meter have no perfectly metrical lines in them: every line violates some constraint because absolute metrical well-formedness is not possible given the constraints in this type of meter. Gradient well-formedness in meter (Youmans 1989) is shown to be both demonstrable and formalizable

The phonology of classical Greek meter

Abstract We propose an analysis of Greek meter based purely on phonology and the idea that well-formedness in meter is largely gradient, rather than absolute. Our analysis is surface-true, constraint-based and nonderivational, in line with proposals like optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The discussion centers on two properties of meter, rhythm (dactylic, anapestic, iambic …) and line length (hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter …). Unmarked meters are expected to be binary (dimeter) and rhythmic (no clash or lapse). We analyze individual meters in terms of how they deviate from this unmarked state, where deviations (big and small) are encoded directly as constraint violations following Golston (1996). Greek anapests are shown to be unmarked in terms of rhythm, while dactyls distinctively violate the constraint NOCLASH and iambs distinctively violate NOLAPSE. Similarly, dimeter is unmarked in terms of binarity, while trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter violate constraints on binarity.

A prosodic theory of laryngeal contrasts

Current models of laryngeal licensing allow as many laryngeal contrasts within a syllable as there are segments, at least in principle. We show here that natural languages are much more economical in their use of laryngeal contrasts than segmental models would lead us to expect. Specifically, we show that voicing, aspiration and glottalisation occur at most once per onset, nucleus or coda in a given language, and that the order in which they are produced within onset, nucleus and coda is never contrastive. To account for these restrictions, we propose that laryngeal features are properties not of segments, but of the onsets, nuclei and codas that dominate them. Phonetic transcription allows us to put in square brackets many things that languages do not actually make use of, such as aspirated glottal stops [?h] or creaky-voice h [h]. It also allows us to posit unattested contrasts like pre- vs. postglottalised nasals [?m] vs. [m?] or breathy-creaky vs. creakybreathy phonation [ae] vs. [ae] and to entertain what seem to be purely orthographic distinctions like [pha] vs. [pha]. We show here that natural language does not use such refined distinctions, and that a restrictive theory of laryngeal features treats them as properties of syllable margins and nuclei, not as properties of individual consonants and vowels.

Zero morphology and constraint interaction: subtraction and epenthesis in German dialects

This paper investigates what looks like a case of subtractive plural morphology in Hessian German, illustrated in (1).

The phonology of Classical Arabic meter

We propose a phonologically well motivated theory of metrics that avoids several problems (e.g. ternarity and center-headedness) with the traditional analysis of Arabic metrics (al-Xalīl †c. 791 ; Maling 1973 ; Prince 1989). We propose that the content of a metrical position is universally restricted to three prosodically motivated units : L, H, LL and that binarity holds at the levels of the verse foot and metron. This constrains the number of possible verse feet to nine and leads to the insight that the traditional Arabic verse feet are in reality metra (pairs of verse feet). The different degrees of popularity of the Arabic meters (cf. corpora in Vadet 1955 ; Stoetzer 1986 ; Bauer 1992), we argue, can be understood as a direct function of rythmic well-formedness. The best meters are all iambic (Ewald 1825 ; Jacob 1967 [1897] ; Fleisch 1956), the rhythmic advantage being that they contain no rhythmic lapse (Kager 1993), an important constraint in Arabic phonology and morphology generally (Fleisch 1956 ; McCarthy and Prince 1990). Relative rhythmic well-formedness is formally expressible under a simple constraint-based analysis (cf. Prince and Smolensky 1993)

The phonology of Greek lyric meter

The meter of Greek lyric poetry shows great variation within and between lines regarding the shape, number and combinations of basic metrical units. We offer a simplifying analysis in terms of markedness, in which meters are defined by distinctive violations of linguistic constraints controlling rhythm, layering, binarity, and alignment. The constraints that are distinctively violated in meter are low ranked in the phonology of Greek.

Breathy and whispery voicing in White Hmong

The White dialect of Hmong uses breathy voice as a tonal feature, and also a distinctive whispery voice as a stop consonant feature. In this paper, acoustic measurements are shown to validate the apparent differences between these two similar phonation types. In particular, relative harmonic intensity and harmonicity were found to be, in general, three ways distinct among Hmong modal, breathy, and whispery phonation. The discovery of distinctly pronounced breathy and whispery phonation in a single language has implications for the representational theory which is used to specify the phonetic grammar.

Phonological constituents and their movement in Latin

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Phonology following peer review. The version of record is available online at http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0952675716000026. ©Cambridge University Press 2016.