Transderivational Identity: Phonological Relations Between Words

Abstract

Through ranking, constraints on the OO-correspondence relation may force a derived word to deviate from the canonical surface patterns of the language in order to be more like its output base. This theory obviates the traditional analysis that deviant phonology in complex words is the product of cyclic derivation. Given transderivational relations, cyclic effects are produced by constraint interaction in nonprocedural Optimality Theory.Cyclic effects are better understood as misapplication identity effects, similar to the over-and underapplication phenomena observed in reduplicated words. Phonological processes may overapply (take place where they are not properly conditioned) or underapply (fail to apply where properly conditioned) to achieve surface identity of paradigmatically-related words. Constraints that demand identity in paradigms interact directly with phonological markedness constraints and input-output faithfulness requirements. When OO-correspondence constraints take precedence, phonology misapplies.Three case studies are presented. The Austronesian language Sundanese shows an overapplication pattern, and Tiberian Hebrew demonstrates underapplication identity effects.In both cases, paradigmatic identity is achieved at the cost of greater markedness in surface forms. Both of these languages also show that paradigmatic identity is sacrificed when it -viiwould produce too marked a structure, providing support for the claim that OOcorrespondence constraints are ranked in a fixed, monostratal grammar.The study of English paradigms presents a theory of phonological classhood. Two arbitrarily-defined classes of affixed words participate in different transderivational identity effects. Each affix class triggers a distinct OO-correspondence relation governed by its own set of faithfulness constraints. All class-specific phonological behavior follows from the ranking of the two sets of OO-correspondence constraints.In this tranderivational theory, phonology is sensitive to morphology because phonological faithfulness relations hold over paradigmatically-related words. There are no cycles or levels of derivation. Complex words, like simplex words, are derived in a parallel grammar, without any intermediate stages.-viii- Morphologically-related words tend to be phonologically similar. In some cases related words are similar just because they share a morpheme and are generated from the same underlying form. For example, cat and cats, which are related by plural affixation, are phonologically identical (to the extent that they are) because both contain the root with the underlying representation /kaet/, and both are derived by the English grammar.In other cases, phonological similarities in related words cannot be explained simply by appeal to a shared underlying form, because achieving identity entails violating regular phonotactic patterns of the language. The morphological difference between two wordse.g., the presence or absence of an affix -makes it so that a phonological alternation is expected in one word ...

Using learnability as a filter on factorial typology: A new approach to Anderson and Browne's generalization

“…For example, to account for certain differences in the application of cooccurrence restrictions in Akkadian and Ponapean, (Lubowicz, in press) assumes that certain affixes can be 'absorbed' by a root as infixes and therefore be subject to different phonotactic requirements. Another similar idea follows from the superimposition of correspondence relations argued for in (Benua, 2000), and also (Revithiadou, 1999) in a different context, where the computation of which correspondence relation to use in assessing faithfulness, when more than one is available, is determined by GEN. If correspondence relations and morphological category status can be changed in these ways, then it is hard to defend the assumption that they are only present at one level of analysis.…”

“…One type of analysis of non-automatic alternations in OT involves the identification of distinct correspondence relations (e.g., (Itô and Mester, 1999), (Benua, 2000)), and recent work on learning lexical stratification has proposed distinct input-to-output correspondence relations as a means of learning the phonologies of different lexical strata (Pater, 2005). 2 The proposal below builds on this approach by extending it to the analysis of non-automatic morpho-phonological alternations based on output-to-output correspondence relations.…”

“…In particular, an antifaithfulness constraint is the wide-scope negation of the proposition expressed by a corresponding faithfulness constraint. Transderivational antifaithfulness constraints are defined on a base-output correspondence relation in the sense of (Benua, 2000). It is this OO-relation that encodes a base-derivative relationship characteristic of input-output mappings in morphology and underscores the morphological function of the alternation.…”

“…Since base rules singles out contrasts in the base construction, each system must encode basederivative relationships, which are modeled here using OO-correspondence along the lines of (Benua, 2000). Majority rules, on the other hand, makes decisions based on the total number of uniform contrast pairs, so the linguistic systems must differ in the total number of contrast pairs for the two roots.…”

“…The IDENT constraints are based on the constraint formalizations in (McCarthy and Prince, 1995), with the positional restrictions from (Lombardi, 1999) and (Beckman, 1999) and applications to output-to-output correspondence from (Benua, 2000). MAX(VOI) is from (Lombardi, 2001), with the addition that it is defined on OO-correspondence.…”