Excerpt: Markedness & Economy in a Derivational Model of Phonology
I've been doing a lot of reading about 'alternative' models of phonology lately-- part of my continual quest to find Something Better Than OT Which Doesn't Involve Turning The Clock Back To 1992-- and today I just started going through Andrea Calabrese's new manuscript, Markedness & Economy in a Derivational Model of Phonology, which you can download here. I love this part (pp. 10-11):
[A]n idiosyncratic and contradictory core, the product of history and its inescapable whims, will always remain. Linguists who deny this core and attempt to provide a synchronic explanation to all aspects of the phonology of a language-- a common attitude, especially in OT-- behave a little bit like individuals who, when faced with the painful contradictions of reality, retreat into magical thinking and try to give sense, through mysterious correspondences, to what is otherwise a broken, shattered and meaningless existence.That totally cracked me up (no pun intended)! A broken, shattered, and meaningless existence indeed! Can I not find the meaning of life by studying phonology? Have I picked the wrong profession? Sigh...
7 Comments:
I think Dr. Calabrese is right, though. (But I have only read the excerpt you posted.) It has always seemed wildly unlikely to me that a phonological theory could simultaneously be purely synchronic and yet capture every regularity. Some regularities are accidents of history. And such theories always end up with the lexicon being festooned with occult marks that vanish on the surface, which always turn out to mean "used to be pronounced ...".
A good example is the claim that the English word "sign" really has a /g/ in the lexicon. A historical explanation of the phenomenon this ploy tries to capture is a thousand times more satisfying: it has what Morrison called "the ring of truth", while the synchronic /g/ feels like the desperation of a dogmatist.
I totally agree with you, ACW. I think that realization is what's missing from phonological theory today, and raising awareness about the effects of history on synchronic grammar is the focus of virtually all of my work.
I think there are very few phonologists left who wouldn't agree with this general sentiment, though there might be valid disagreements over particular cases, and outlier extremists on both ends of the spectrum.
The quotation from Calabrese technically leaves it open whether this "attitude" exists outside of OT, but I wonder whether it really is more prevalent in OT. For example, I'm sure Morris Halle still believes that the Great Vowel Shift is to be accounted for synchronically, and that (quoting Chomsky) "the rules deriving the alternants decide-decisive-decision [...] are straightforward and natural at each step." Highly abstract analyses such as these (and also the /g/ in "sign" example cited by ACW) can be traced back to rule-based SPE. In fact, I can't think of any particular piece of (influential) work in OT that uniquely or originally attempts to capture a synchronically spurious regularity like this that has a better diachronic explanation. Can either of you (or better, Calabrese) actually cite one?
(Incidentally, even Kiparsky's efforts to minimize abstract analyses in early generative phonology wouldn't have the effect one might want: for example, the underlying /g/ in "sign" is claimed to be supported by its relation to the actual surface [g] in "signature", which is enough to escape the Alternation Condition and its descendants.)
I think one such area, if I understand what you're asking, Eric, is epenthesis of synchronically arbitrary consonants. There have been a lot of OT attempts to get a particular segment to be preferred via synchronic markedness constraints, perceptual accounts, etc., when looking into the language's history shows that there was once a rule deleting that same segment, and reanalysis of that rule led straightforwardly to epenthesis.
That's a good example, though I think that at least some of the folks who pursue perceptually-based accounts ultimately believe that there's the same perceptual basis to the historical loss of the consonant in the first place. (This is not a defense of those accounts; I don't pretend to know enough about either perception or diachrony to comment.)
(Incidentally, in my paper on Eastern Mass. r, I argued that synchronic insertion of r is crucially dependent on the fact that r is also deleted. It's in OT and has to do with the interpretation of faithfulness, and involves no particular synchronic claims about markedness or perception.)
Yes, I have read your paper and cited it as the OT account that "gets it" as far as the history goes. As for the perceptual basis of the loss, that could be true in many cases, but there are some where you get deletion & subsequent epenthesis of segments like b, g, k, and so on, where it's hard to see how that could be the case.
I'd be interested to read this paper of yours. Is it available somewhere?
(I assume that in the paper you have stronger counterevidence than the "it's hard to see how that could be the case" type ... again, not defending a perceptual account in these sorts of cases, but also not dismissing one based on my current inability to see how one might work.)
Post a Comment
<< Home