Typological (a)symmetriesThe typology of stress patterns that we find among the world's languages displays an astonishing symmetry, and much of the research in metrical theory over the last decades has concentrated on this property. There are languages where main stress is assigned close to the right edge of the prosodic word, others where it is assigned close to the left edge. There are quantity-sensitive languages, where heavy syllables systematically attract stress, and quantity-insensitive languages, where syllable weight does not influence stress placement at all. In metrical theory therefore it has been proposed that the typology of stress systems is to a large extent determined by a limited set of binary parameters (e.g. among others Hayes 1980, Prince 1983, Halle and Vergnaud 1987, Hayes 1995. An incomplete list includes the following parameters:(1) a. Foot-type: a language makes use of either left-headed (trochaic) or right-headed (iambic) feet. b. Directionality of parsing: feet are built either starting from the left or starting from the right edge of the prosodic word. c. Location of main stress: main stress is assigned either close to the left or close to the right edge of prosodic words. d. Quantity sensitivity: stress placement either is sensitive to syllable weight or it is not However, researchers have also often observed that the typology of stress patterns does contain certain empirically attested asymmetries that should be accounted for. To name but one well-known case, Hayes (1995: 73) observes that quantity-insensitive systems are typically trochaic and accounts for this fact by proposing a universal asymmetrical footinventory from which quantity-insensitive iambs are excluded.Furthermore, with the rise of optimality theory (Prince and Smolenky 1993), attention has been drawn to phenomena showing that the picture of binary parameters that are either on or off for a certain language is too simple. For instance, it has been observed (Alber 1997) that there are languages that are neither consistently quantity-sensitive nor consistently quantity-insensitive. In these partially quantity-sensitive systems heavy syllable attract stress only in case no higher ranked constraints prohibits it. When all higher ranked constraints are satisfied, the constraint requiring heavy syllables to be stressed can show its force and quantity-sensitive patterns emerge.On a similar line, Rosenthall and van der Hulst (1999) propose that contrary to what is usually assumed, closed CVC syllables are not consistently light or consistently heavy in a specific language. There are languages where the weight of CVC syllable changes according to context. Context-sensitive weight, they claim, arises when CVC syllables are generally heavy (or light) in a certain language but change their weight under the pressure of constraints that favor heavy (or light) CVC syllables only in a specific context. Thus, with the concept of constraint violability, the possibility of further asymmetries in the typology emerges. 1In this paper I...
A factorial typology is a set of grammars. We are not given the grammars directly, but must deduce them from the way that the posited constraints deal with the posited structures. How do we know that the candidate sets we have examined are sufficient to discriminate all the grammars that are allowed by our assumptions? This is the problem of finding a universal support for a typology. Without a universal support, we don't have the typology, and without the typology, many types of systematic claims about it must languish unjustified.Here we show how the universal status of a proposed support may be established when we have exact descriptions of the types of optima allowed in the grammars. If a typology is factored into (intensional) ranking properties in the sense of Alber & Prince (in prep.), and if the property values are associated with (extensional) characteristics carried by optima, then a grammar as a combination of values is associated with a description of its optima as a conjunction of the characteristics associated with the values. If the descriptions thereby obtained uniquely denote single candidates, then the grammars cannot be further refined, and the support that produced the grammars must be universal.This method of associating extensional characteristics with ranking patterns answers a much more general question: what do the languages of a typology look like? Since a typology is generated from a finite sample of candidate sets, we cannot in general be satisfied with remarking about the distribution of characteristics in the sample. We must use the grammars to project over the entire set of optima. The grammatical structure relevant to this enterprise is encoded in the ranking properties that combine to give the grammars.
The paper illustrates the methodology at the basis of the design of a digital library system that enables the management of linguistic resources of curated dialect data. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated information management system providing the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geolinguistic parameters. Secondly, the information management system has to be designed to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order). Thirdly, user-friendly graphical interfaces must give easy access to language resources and make the building of the language resources easier and distributed. This work, which stems from a project named ASIt (Atlante Sintattico d’Italia), is a first step towards the creation of a European digital library for recording and studying linguistic micro-variation
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