Re: Moraic codas [was Re: 'Yemls Morphology]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> To me it's curious that that doesn't result in a geminate consonant.  In OT
> terms, I suppose you could explain it by saying that you have a constraint
> hierarchy like the following:
>
>     *Germinate >> *V[-tense]]_Syl, Onset, >> *Ambisyllabic
>
> (I think;  the last constraint prohibits constructions like *[hæpI] for
> me, at any rate)
>
> One of the things I don't like about OT is that this doesn't explain why this
> particular ranking should be the case as opposed to others.  But then,
> maybe that's something that's not ultimately possible to ascertain, because
> we'd need to be there to watch the linguistic change in action.
I agree with you completely. OT is in need of many things, and a good
theory of constraint ranking is one of them. Another thing, closely
related, is a theory of what a constraint can be, and how they are
learned. As long as people continue to create "arbitrary" constraints
based on a description of the data, rather than use some kind of
theoretical guidelines, Optimality Theorists are likely to get
many explanatory results.

Much of my work in the past three months or so have been on a revision of
OT to involve inviolable constraints. Everybody I've shown my work to
agrees that inviolability is required; though, of course, they don't
always agree with how I try to do it).

Marcus

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