Re: stress

From:    "David J. Peterson" <dedalvs@...>
> #1 wrote:
> > I'm now trying to find a good way to create the stress for my
> > conlang. But I'd want it to be natural AND regular
>
> Maybe Tom Wier can help me out on the details, but in my opinion,
> the one and only thing optimality theory (OT) is good for is creating
> regular, interesting stress systems.
I'd say this is somewhat of an exaggeration.  Basically, from
the perspective of classical generative phonology of the late
1960s and 70s, when you have a conspiracy of rules operating
across the lexicon, you don't have many tools at your disposal
to work with.  That's why in the late 70s and and 80s, people
started to introduce constraints on rule ontogeny. Thus, although
a language might have four or five completely different repair
strategies for achieving an optimal syllable structure, if you
have a constraint in the grammar, then, the story goes, you're
capturing the generalization in some sort of formal device.
The problem was that it wasn't obvious how constraints themselves
came about (aside from purely functional reasons).  The real
break of OT away from this tradition is in getting rid of
rule formalisms entirely: you simply have a constraint hierarchy
and a GEN function that map the input to and from the output
through potential output candidates.

> [Note: I don't mean that Tom should back
> me up on my opinion, but that I'm far removed from OT, and certainly
> don't want to look at it again, so what I'm about to explain might not
> be right.]
Well... I don't like OT much either, but for separate reasons.
Namely:  even if you can reduce the candidate set to N^2 candidates
(where N is the number of constraints), as has recently been proven,
there's no reason at all to assume that this has some sort of
psychological reality.  That is, if you take the psychological-reality
predictions of particular theories seriously, it just won't work, even
as a kind of algorithm whose output goes immediately into some kind of
memory storage system.

> According to OT, all stress systems are regular.  If there's what
> looks like an irregularity in the language, it should fall out
> from ranked constraints, even if there's only one exception.
This is the ideal, yes, but I wouldn't say that most prosodic
phonologists think that you can eliminate underlying specification
of stress from all languages.  This is particularly problematic for
stress-systems that arise from tonal systems, as in some Bantu
languages; I would think that tones are actually underlyingly
specified in most tonal languages.  There is at least one dissertation
I can think of off the top of my head that deals with this issue:
John Alderete's, entitled _Morphologically Governed Accent in Optimality
Theory_, which mostly concerns Cupeno (Uto-Aztecan), but also some
Japanese and Russian data.

(For all who are interested, they will be able to find that dissertation
on the Rutgers Optimality Archive.  If they have problems, I can upload
it to my website for downloading.)

Anyways, otherwise it was a pretty good synopsis of how OT views the
world.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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