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Re: THEORY: [CONLANG] OT Syntax

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Tuesday, November 21, 2000, 16:12
On Sun, 19 Nov 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> And Rosta wrote: > > >It seems to me to be an inescapable weakness of both OT and Minimalism that > >they have such difficulties dealing with 'free variant' structures -- > >structures that are different but are the same at interpretation at the > >conceptual interface. > > This is certainly true of Minimalism. Chomsky explicitly states that there > is no optionality in syntax. All different structures have a slightly > different meaning to them, even if you cannot pin down the exact difference. > > However, apparently you are unfamiliar with the stochastic OT model. I'm > probably not the best person to be explaining this, but here it goes: > > Under Stochastic OT, constraints are not in a simple "linear". Each > constraint is a "wave": imagine the one positive peak of a sine wave, and > you get the idea. Each constraint is a separate wave, and they overlap. So, > say 10% of the time, Constraint A precedes Constraint B, but the remaining > 90% Constraint B precedes Constraint A. This means that in 10% of the > utterances, the optimal candidate will be determine by A instead of B, but > in the other 90% the candidate faithful to B will win out over the one > faithful to A. > > There is a paper relating this to Syntax by Ash Asudeh at Stanford. > Unfortunately, I have not been able to read it yet, because the copies he > uploaded to Rutgers are corrupt.
Paul Boersma has addressed this issue as well. Chapter 15 of his PhD dissertation is titled "How we learn variation, optionality, and probability;" it is available separately from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.
> >Interesting. It seems to be true of all the artlangers here that at heart > >they are fieldworkers, even when, like Matt & Dirk, they're also > >theoreticians. > > Half the point to being a linguist is too learn "exotic" languages. The > more different from English the better. I actually like to make my theories > account for the obscure languages, then cram English into those theories -- > the opposite of the standard approach linguists take. I've had the thrill > of watching professors squirm at my proposals, but having to hedge on their > criticisms since they believe in Universal Grammar and Chickasaw plainly > does what I claimed.
As I understand it, this is exactly what Sadock did with Autolexical Syntax; it was intended to be a theoretical model able to account for incorporation in West Greenlandic Eskimo. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu