Paul Kiparsky

Some consequences of Lexical Phonology

Phonological theory in recent years can be said to have undergone a ‘modularisation’ in several respects. The formal theory is no longer expected to explain everything about phonology by itself: generalisations about phonological change which previously were used to motivate constraints on abstractness or opacity have turned out to make more sense as effects of real-time language acquisition and use. Secondly, phonological representations have become multi-tiered arrays, and much that seemed problematic about the application of rules has resolved itself in terms of properties of these arrays. Lastly, phonology itself is seen as applying both within the lexicon to the output of each morphological process, and to the output of the syntsactic component. The lexicon, moreover, may itself be organised into a hierarchy of levels, each constituting a quasi-autonomous morphological and phonological domain. In this paper I propose to investigate some consequences of this third kind of modularisation, the approach which has come to be known as LEXICAL PHONOLOGY.

Opacity and cyclicity

Cyclic phonology-morphology interactions and opacity have been dealt with in strictly parallelist OT by introducing new constraint types, including Base-Output constraints and Sympathy. An alternative OT approach to the phonology-morphology interface is a constraint-based version of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM), in which stems, words, and sentences are subject to separate, serially related OT constraint systems. I show that OT-based LPM provides a superior account of the cyclic morphology/phonology interaction in Levantine data from which Kenstowicz and Kager drew support for Base-Output constraints, and that the same account explains the derivational opacity phenomena for which Sympathy theory provides a purely descriptive solution.

A PARAMETRIC THEORY OF POETIC METER

This paper presents a parametric theory of poetic meter which defines a set of formally possible meters based on the prosodic constituents and categories given by universal grammar, and a functional principle that selects an optimal meter for a particular language on the basis of its lexical phonological structure. We support this theory by a detailed analysis of a favored meter in Finnish, a stress-based meter in which syllable count varies in accord with constraints on syllable weight, and show why partially similar meters are likewise favored in English.*

Structural case in finnish

Finnish syntax and inflectional morphology support a parallel decomposition of abstract case and morphosyntactic/morphological case into two binary features. The correspondence between these levels is governed by ranked violable faithfulness constraints. The constraints are shown to account for the major clause types of Finnish, and their generality is demonstrated with a rudimentary typology of ergative case systems.

Stress, Syntax, and Meter

The way stress is patterned in English verse depends on word and phrase structure, according to strict rules which are not accounted for by either traditional or more recent metrics. This paper is a contribution to the exploration of these rules, and an attempt to develop a formal metrical theory capable of expressing them. The presentation is organized as follows. After an introductory review of some of the problems and proposed solutions in metrics, I give (?1) a sketch of the theory to be defended here. ?2 is devoted to justifying this theory on the basis of a fairly close examination of Shakespeares verse. Then the scope of the investigation is extended in several directions: to other varieties of iambic pentameter (??3.1-2), trochaic meter (?3.3), ternary meters (?3.4), and finally (?3.5) to some similarities and differences between the metrics of English and other languages, on which the present approach sheds new light.*

BLOCKING IN NONDERIVED ENVIRONMENTS

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses blocking in non-derived environments. Previous treatments of non-derived environment blocking (NDEB) have not succeeded in reconciling empirical coverage with theoretical adequacy. The revised alternation condition (RAC) provides a descriptively fairly accurate circumscription of the phenomenon, except that formulating the constraint as a categorical prohibition of absolute neutralization is probably too strong. The RAC is, however, clearly unsatisfactory as a principle of grammar, because of the formal indefinability of the class of neutralization rules, the undesirability of having different principles for obligatory and optional rules, and the dubious status of the concept of derived environment. The strict cycle condition, on the other hand, is preferable on general theoretical grounds but simply fails to match the facts in many specific instances. The chapter presents a new interpretation that resolves this dilemma. It makes essential use of underspecification and of decomposition of structure-changing rules. Its main advantages are that it reduces the blocking effects to independent principles of grammar, predicts their restriction to structure-building rules and to non-vacuous rule applications, recaptures the empirical generalizations behind the original restriction of the alternation condition to obligatory neutralization rules, and correctly subsumes the free element condition of prosodic phonology.

Blocking and periphrasis in inflectional paradigms

Paradigmsthatcombinesynthetic(one-word)andperiphrasticformsin complementarydistributionhaveloomedlargein discussionsof morphologicalblocking (McCloskeyandHale 1983, Poser1986,Andrews1990).Suchcompositeparadigmspotentiallychallengethelexicalistclaim that wordsandsentencesareorganizedby distinct subsystemsof grammar . They areof course grist for themill of DistributedMorphology, a theorywhich revelsin everykind of interpenetration of morphologyandsyntax.But theyhavepromptedevenParadigmFunctionMorphologists to introducesyntacticconstructionsinto their morphology. I shall argue,instead,for a lexicalist treatment,which is basedon theideathatblockingis afiltering devicethatappliesto theoutputof thegenerativesystem,ratherthanoperatingdirectlyonits derivations(Wunderlich1996).I present this approachto blockingin section1, andshowin section2 how it dealswith the intricatecompositeverbparadigmof Latin, wheretheperiphrasticperfectpassivesuppliesthemissingpieces of an otherwisesyntheticinflectionalsystem. This part of Latin verb morphologyhasrecently beentreatedfrom theperspectiveof DistributedMorphologyandParadigmFunctionMorphology. I comparemy solutionto thesetreatmentsandarguethat it is superiorin two respects:it predicts the complementarityof the syntheticandperiphrasticformationsandyet allows their respective morphologicalandsyntacticpropertiesto becaptured,andit readilycoverssomebasicdatathat theotheranalysesgetwrong.

The Amphichronic Program vs. Evolutionary Phonology

Abstract 1. Synchronic and historical explanation Evolutionary Phonology. Evolutionary Phonology seeks to derive typological generalizations from recurrent patterns of language change, themselves assumed to be rooted in perception, production, and acquisition. The goal is to eliminate UG by providing diachronic explanations for the cross-linguistic evidence that has been used to motivate it.

The Shift to Head-Initial VP in Germanic

An interesting asymmetry in syntactic change is that OV base order is commonly replaced by VO, whereas the reverse development is quite rare in languages. A shift to VO has taken place in several branches of the Indo-European family, as well as in Finno-Ugric. The Germanic languages conform to this trend in that the original OV order seen in its older representatives, and (in more rigid form) in modern German, Dutch, and Frisian, has given way to a consistently head-initial syntax in English, Scandinavian, and Yiddish:

Dvandvas, blocking, and the associative: The bumpy ride from phrase to word

The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndeti-cally coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The analysis points to a solution to the theoretical problem of nonmonotonic trajectories in diachrony, a challenge for causal theories of change that claim that analogical processes are simplifying or regularizing. The idea is that optimization of such a highly structured object as a language does not proceed monotonically, but via a sequence of local optima.