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Parsing in OT
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Hammond, Michael. Parsing in OT. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3JS9NH0

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TitleParsing in OT
NameHammond, Michael (Author)
Date Created1997
SubjectPhonology, Syllabification, Syllabication, Epenthesis, Constraints (Linguistics)
Extent22 p.
DescriptionOptimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1993) maintains that phonological generalizations can be treated by a two-step process. First, all possible pronunciations for some string are generated by the GEN operation. Then, the best of these different pronunciations is chosen by a set of ranked and violable constraints. This is the dominant theory of phonology today. This theory poses a serious problem for theories of phonological performance; the model cannot be implemented in real time because the candidate set is infinite. Even if we eliminate a number of options in generating candidates, we are still left with an extremely large number of candidate pronunciations to sift through in finite time.

In this paper, I propose to implement syllabification in OT as a parser. I propose several innovations that result in a finite and small candidate set. The candidate set problem is handled with several moves: i) MAX and DEP violations are not hypothesized by the parser, ii) candidates are encoded locally, and iii) EVAL is applied constraint by constraint.

The parser I propose is implemented in Prolog. It has a number of desirable consequences. First, it runs and thus provides an existence proof that syllabification can be implemented in OT. There are a number of other desirable consequences as well. First, constraints are implemented as finite-state transducers. Second, the parser makes several interesting claims about the phonological properties of so-called nonrecoverable insertions and deletions. Third, the implementation suggests some particular reformulations of some of the benchmark constraints in the OT arsenal, e.g. *COMPLEX, PARSE, ONSET, and NOCODA. Finally, the implementation is compared with various other proposals in the literature, e.g. Ellison (1994), Hammond (1995), Tesar (1995), and Eisner (1997).
GenreArticle, Non-refereed
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3JS9NH0
LanguageEnglish
CollectionRutgers Optimality Archive
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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