The Fundamental Insight of OT - Essay Example

"The fundamental insight of OT is that no phonological constraint can ever be turned off in any language." Introduction The topic I have chosen to discuss is "The fundamental insight of OT is that no phonological constraint can ever be turned off in any language." The approach called Optimality Theory, originally developed by Prince and Smolensky (1993). I will discuss OT in terms of phonological constraint and takes into account what is known about human cognition. OT is in many ways a fusion between earlier linguistic theories and local models. The discussion here is limited to phonological matters, but the consequences of these considerations are potentially much broader. "As, OT offers a useful tool for exploring language in general and language acquisition in particular, thus setting up possibilities for clinical application. No theory is of lasting value, but while examining data within the framework of the theory, new insights into the data emerge". Joseph Paul Stemberger And Barbara Handford Bernhardt "The Emergence of Faithfulness" http://www.linguistics.ubc.ca/People/Stemberger/S_B_1999.pdf. Stemberger & Bernhardt, 1999 asserted "The basis of OT is the use of constraints rather than rules. Rules within language are procedures that construct representations and alter them in particular ways. Constraints, in contrast, are limitations on what is possible in a system. Constraints can also lead to the alteration of a representation such that information is lost or added. From a cognitive-psychological perspective, however, the mechanisms are quite different". (Stemberger & Bernhardt, 1999, pp. 417-446) Phonological Properties If we conceptualize phonology as part of the process for producing and understanding language, the phonological properties of language must result from the fact that it is an extremely practiced behavior linked with the vocal tract of human beings. To move away from the more theoretical views of phonology, it is perhaps helpful to compare speaking to other moderately complex but repetitive neuron-motor activities, such as playing the piano. While a person learns to play the piano, he or she learns not just to strike notes, but to strike notes in sequence. Every piece of music has its own sequence of notes that should be learned. Practice is essential; the motor patterns that guide to the fluent, striking of longer and longer sequences of notes should be automated for a piece to begin to sound like music. With practice, the transitions linking the notes become more fluent, and the speed of execution mechanically increases. In order to maintain the correct rhythm and tempo, the player should at times hold back and not play every note as fast as doable. Several analogies with the acquisition and use of phonology are observable. Children learn phonological sequences as parts of words, never separately of words. Articulatory routines that are by now mastered are called forth for the production of new words, leading to a propensity of children to expand their vocabulary by obtaining words that are phonologically comparable to those they already know (Ferguson and Farwell 1975, Lindblom 1992). This propensity leads to the structuring of the phonological sequences across words and the restrictive of the potentially massive phonetic inventory. Put another way, the repetition of gestures and sequences across words permits relations of identity and similarity to expand in stretches of speech, giving rise to segment, syllable, and foot-sized units. Through practice, speakers become more fluent in stringing words together and this fluency and automation is typified by the smoothing of transitions and overlapping of movements forced by the need to retain information value. Several repeated sequences become highly automated and abridged in form. At the same time, speakers should be able to access and recruit sequences into new combinations to state their thoughts and intentions. With practice, the capability to produce new combinations is also improved, probably by the storage of multiword constructional schema (Bybee 1998, Pawley and Syder 1983). The use of novel combinations, though, does not comprise as large a percentage of impulsive speech as one might suppose. Erman and Warren (1999) estimate that about 55% of the spoken and written texts they investigate consisted of prefabricated multiword sequences. Grammatical and Phonological Structure Emerges Grammatical and phonological structure emerges from the details of co-occurrence in language use. Words that usually occur together for instance, nouns and their determiners, or verbs and their objects begin to act as constituents. The more commonly they co-occur, the tighter their constituency becomes (Bybee and Scheibman 1999). Phonological structure is pretentious by use in that articulatory accommodations occur as the consequence of real language use. This is the sense in which grammar can be said to be developing. Emergence in language is much more complex than the emergence described earlier of the structure of the termite nest. The main difference is that human beings are much more intelligent than termites. First, the experiences of human beings in using language are registered in the brain, are categorized there, and gain some of their structure from categorizing capabilities of the mind. Second, the use of language by humans is goal-oriented or purposeful. The purpose is to communicate thoughts, perspectives, needs, desires, and so on. Note that the purpose of communicative acts is to communicate, not to create grammar. Yet the result of innumerable communicative acts is to change language and to create and recreate grammar (Bybee et al. 1994, Keller 1994). Thus, functional constraints are marked in specific languages through individual acts of language use. If there is a constraint similar to the no coda constraint of Optimality Theory, it is a consequence of the phonetic tendency to lessen and coarticulate coda consonants more than onset consonants. This tendency evident itself in every instance of language use in languages that have coda consonants, falling these consonants by very small degrees. sooner or later, coda consonants are lost in such languages, leaving a language with a reduced number of coda consonants or none at all. Since no analogous tendency operates on onset consonants, the effect is that some languages lack codas, but that no languages lack onsets. Thus, the junction of phonetic grounding and language-specific and typological properties takes place in the individual speaker in numerous instances of language use. Optimality Theory and Phonological Systems Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky, 1993, 1997) views phonological systems as a consequence of rankings of universal constraints. Its apparently radical approach totally discards the time-honored concept of rule, reinstating it with a set of constraints. These constraints are not learned but rather are inborn and universal. They may be thought of as natural tendencies in languages, for instance, there is a constraint against having voiced codas. The grammars of languages include constraints on the well-formedness of structures, but these constraints frequently conflict with one another. The resolution of these constraints comes concerning by ranking them, and the variation among languages is due to language specific rankings. Consequently, in English the constraints of no coda and no consonant clusters are outranked by authenticity (utter everything as it is), however in Hawaiian no coda and no consonant clusters outrank authenticity. Therefore, Meg and Chris would be pronounced [meki] and [kaliki]. The fundamental operation of OT is as follows: The input (underlying form or Underlying Representation in conventional generative phonology) goes into the generator (GEN), which makes possible candidates; after that the evaluator (EVAL) evaluates these. By ranking constraints in different orders different optimal candidates or optimal outputs are formed. There are two most important types of constraints, which can conflict: structural (markedness) and faithfulness (input = output). This distinction is suggestive of the long-noted dual functions of phonology: Make sound pronounceable and make them explicable.' These can as well be at cross-purposes: Reducing final consonant clusters in English makes words easier to pronounce however harder to understand. Hammond (1997) observed that all the probable syllable structures permitted by the languages of the world are produced by a variety of rankings of faithfulness (input = output), onset (begin syllables with a consonant), and no coda(s) (end syllables with a vowel). OT bears a doubtful resemblance to Natural Phonology, which had appeared almost twenty-five years earlier (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), while this parallel has not been recognized in the OT literature. In Natural Phonology, OT constraints can be viewed as processes, and rankings as ordering of processes. Also, a reranking of constraints is synonymous with suppression and/or reordering of natural processes. In the context of Optimality Theory, Burzio (1996) argues that if the grammar is not a set of rewrite rules, then much of the motivation for fundamental representations is lost. Also, he argues that certain patterns, for instance English stress, are merely partly predictable from segmental patterns, making the storage of stress marking essential. Kirchner (1997) argues for a gradient view of contrastiveness derivable from the ordering of constraints in Optimality Theory, somewhat than a strict division between predictable and contrastive features. Steriade (2000) argues against the distinction between phonetic and phonological features by showing that definite features that are generally measured phonetic (predictable), for instance English flapping, have lexically explicit behavior. Burzio (1996) and Steriade (2000) indicate, as did Hochberg (1978), that the effects explained by the phonological cycle can as well simply and naturally be described by having lexical forms identical to surface forms. Booij (2000), Cole and Hualde (1998), and Janda (1999) argue from language change that lexical representations are altered enduringly by sound change, such that old underlying representations do not resurface when rules turn out to be unproductive (Hochberg J. 1978). Cole and Hualde further argue that sound changes do not ever denote underlying forms that differ from surface forms. The view of phonemic classification being developed in the studies mentioned thus far is somewhat different from the one that caused the establishment of the phoneme as the unit of mental representation. The most important arguments for the abstracted phoneme as a noteworthy unit were linked to its contrastive function: phonemic contrasts were recognized as those phonetic contrasts that distinguished words (Jakobson and Halle 1956). Expected features were measured unimportant for identifying words and, therefore, phonemic systems could be boiled down to a simple set of oppositions. Since this view of perception is not precise, one of the major arguments for phonemic representation, plus the theories based on it, have to be dismissed (Ohala and Ohala 1993). Rationale for OT A fundamental rationale for OT might be formulated as the it that cross linguistically valid regularities of phonological form are to be found in output configurations i.e., in the shapes of linguistic forms as they are pronounced rather than in input (lexical) configurations or in the details of rules mapping one onto the other. The significance particularly of "cross-linguistically valid regularities" is certainly that these are the most likely to come from aspects of Universal Grammar (UG), and therefore to be in some sense definitional of the language organ. The approach followed by generative phonologists up to that point had been to proceed from an interpretation of the phonemic principle to construct a system of underlying phonological forms. These have two related desiderata: a. Abstract away from surface differences that are because of regularities of the language; and b. To the extent possible (that is except for cases of suppletion), attribute the same phonological shape to a given linguistic element (word, morpheme) in all environments in which it appears. The rules of the grammar then, exist (a) to state the regularities of sound structure in the language; (b) to relate the abstract phonological forms of linguistic elements to their phonetic realizations in different contexts. The thought followed by Prince and Smolensky and which has driven OT is that this approach is eventually unproductive in satisfying the main objective of phonological theory: to offer a substantive meaning of what constitutes a probable phonological system for a natural language. Whereas it is noticeably significant to offer accurate descriptions of individual languages, the task of understanding UG needs us to provide a more general account of the content and organization of I-language. Traditional generative phonology thinks of a grammar as a collection of rules, each of the form A B/C D. Such a rule looks for input sequences of the form CAD and carries out an operation of the form A B ("A takes on property B") on them. But "[f]or this format to be worth pursuing, there must be an interesting theory which defines the class of possible predicates CAD (Structural Descriptions) and another theory which defines the class of possible operations (Structural Changes)." These theories have confirmed to be "loose and uninformative," and therefore we must conclude that "the locus of explanatory action is elsewhere" (Prince and Smolensky 1993, p. 3). The point here is that the rules themselves do not actually appear to be very helpful in arriving at generalizations regarding universal properties of phonological form. We can try to found generalizations regarding what kind of things rules can do, however all such theories appear to permit for the formulation of lots of things we "know" to be impossible. This proposes we must look elsewhere for explanations. Also, theories of rules have been restricted to theories of individual rules. Even the best theory of the Structural Descriptions and Structural Changes of particular rules misses the on the whole nature of phonologies: that sets of rules have a coherence that cannot be seen in the individual rules themselves. As exemplified by the two rules for the pronunciation of consonant clusters in inflectional forms, devoicing can have an effect on either the stem-final consonant or the ending itself depending on which form the ending has. These two rules are in principle fairly independent of one another; however together evidently express a single regularity. Now in the 1970s and 1980s there were various proposals made to the effect that the foundation of phonological rules was to be required in their effects: i.e., that there were a variety of regularities of surface pattern that provided the motivation for the differences between underlying and surface form that are expressed by individual rules. A language does not have an epenthesis rule because it likes epenthesis, but rather because as a result of this rule, it will avoid ill-formed clusters (as in English inflection, discussed above, or the rule of Spanish that avoids initial/sC/by insert in gan initial[e]in words like Espaa). A language has assimilation rules not because of the way they work, but because as a result, all clusters will be homogeneous in some property. Often it appears to be the case that a language has multiple rules, each of which by itself is merely part of the picture, although which taken together have the effect that some pattern exists on the surface. Therefore English assimilates voice increasingly in inflection (/kt + z/[khts]), however regressively in some other cases of inflection (lose/lost). These "conspiracies" (a term introduced by Kisseberth) appear to have a natural formulation as ways to convince some constraint on surface representations. Suppose we take this effect as the locus of explanation in phonology. Then we can attempt to build up a theory of how representational well-formedness determines the assignment of phonological structure: a theory of constraints and their interaction, as opposed to a theory of rules. The nature of these constraints has been the subject of deep investigation in recent years. A significant fundamental view is that constraints are instantiations of universal aspects of sound structure - therefore, they are the stuff of UG. Constraints address representational well-formedness (somewhat than the mechanics of converting one representation into another), also it is supposed that most of the content of this view is because of the structure of the human language faculty, rather than to arbitrary interlinguistic variation. OT and Related Constraints A conceptually significant difference between OT and related theories lies in the claim that constraints can be operative in a language even when they are not necessarily true (or satisfied) in every form. The members of a given set of constraints are characteristically in conflict, and not mutually consistent: satisfying one constraint may need the violation of another. The way a particular language resolves these conflicts is what characterizes its particular phonology a supposed to those of other languages. We can make this concrete by signifying that there are two basically conflicting demands in sound structure: MARKEDNESS: the propensity for phonetic forms to be pronounced in a simple, natural way (as resolute in part by the nature of speech articulation, acoustics, and audition, and partly conceivably by more abstract cognitive factors - all aspects of the human language faculty). FAITHFULNESS: the propensity for properties that differentiate lexical elements from one another within a given language to be preserved in the phonetic realizations of those elements. The view of markedness definitely has a long series of antecedents. Attempts to incorporate it into generative phonology, though, had taken a form that efficiently permitted the "unmarked" status of an element or configuration to figure in a grammar merely to the extent it was true or completely satisfied. Relative markedness essentially has no expression in systems such as that of Chomsky and Halle 1968: rules could be assessed as "cheaper" to the extent they contributed to a universally unmarked set of possibilities; however this was fundamentally an all-or-nothing effect. OT, on the contrary, permits for the possibility that a markedness effect can contribute to the sound pattern of a language although some (perhaps even most) of the language's actual forms violate it. Consider these issues with respect to an instance. In terms of the places of articulation found in the world's languages, labials, dentals, as well as velars are all quite usually found; however labialized velars (e.g., [k w]) are much less common. In a language like English, where there are no labialized velars, the effects of this constraint are absolute. We could state this by saying that "though the lexical representation of an English word had a lexical labialized velar, it would be pronounced without velarization." Such a markedness constraint unavoidably comes into conflict with the fundamental faithfulness property, expressed by a constraint to the effect that lexical values must be preserved. A language like English can then be portrayed by saying that in such a language, the markedness constraint takes precedence over (or "dominates") the faithfulness constraint. In English, we have languages whose sound patterns are different in systematic ways regarding the appearance of labialized velar consonants. Those differences in sound pattern are not easily expressed as differences in the content of the system of morphophonemic rules appropriate to each language. We can, though, typify the ways in which the knowledge of English, Menomini, and Kwakw'ala speakers vary in terms of the relative dominance of members of fundamentally the same system of constraints. The system of UG offers us with the relevant constraints, at least in some form. What differentiates one language from another (and therefore, what individual speakers know regarding their language in the domain in question) is the way these constraints relate to one another. In other words, a specific language organ is explained not in terms of a collection of rules, however rather in terms of the relative ranking of the constraints made available by UG. Constraints therefore come in several flavors: MARKEDNESS CONSTRAINTS (the propensity for phonetic forms to be pronounced in a simple, natural way): CONTEXT-FREE markedness constraints explain overall preferences for certain feature configurations over others within a single segment; and Context-sensitive markedness constraints explain preferences for certain feature configurations over others in combinations of segments. FAITHFULNESS CONSTRAINTS (the propensity for properties that differentiate lexical elements from one another to be preserved in their phonetic realizations): MaxIO constraints need that every element in the input has a correspondent in the output; DepIO constraints need that every element in the output be the correspondent of some element in the input; and IdentIO constraints require particular properties of output segments to be identical to those of the corresponding input segments. We have as so far said nothing regarding just how a system of constraints, etc. permits us to compute a surface form corresponding to a given input. Essentially, this process consists in a comparison among all of the formally probable surface forms that might correspond to that input (a set of "candidates"), ensuing in the selection of that candidate that best conforms to the system of ranked constraints. The grammar therefore consists of two components, named Gen and Eval. Gen operates on input representations to produce a set of candidates; these, in turn, are assessed by Eval. The candidate with the highest degree of harmony (that is the one which violates highly ranked constraints to the smallest possible degree) is (by definition) best, and is therefore chosen as the output. When we investigate languages from this viewpoint, what we find is that the same set of constraints can explain numerous different systems, depending on their relation to one another. In any given language, the constraints are organized in a hierarchy, and then contribute to the determination of correct surface forms via principles of "harmony". Conclusion This paper offered a general overview of phenomena in phonological development within the OT (constraint-based) approach. In the paper it is explored some reasons to think that a system of constraints implemented in the general way proposed by OT may offer a more precise description of the content of a speaker's linguistic knowledge than a system of rules that specify the mechanics of converting input to output forms. The replacement of rule-based theories by constraint-based ones is definitely not complete (even in phonology), and several other details of the architecture of the language faculty remain to be explored in order fully to appreciate the nature and role of such constraints. However, it is fair to say that the bulk of research in phonology at present is being conducted within this general framework; and furthermore, that the replacement of rules by constraints has followed from a greater appreciation of the demands of a theory that asserts to present a description of speakers' knowledge, not just of the forms speakers employ. It is natural, then, to ask whether this consequence is restricted to the study of phonology. In actual fact, recent years have seen a number of efforts to apply the analytic methods of OT as practiced by phonologists directly to syntactic problems. However irrespective of whether the specifics of theoretical apparatus transfer literally from one domain of linguistic structure to another in this way, there is a more general trend of which OT is a part, which is definitely pertinent to areas other than phonology. REFERENCES Bernhardt B. H., & Stemberger J. P. (1998). 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