Re: THEORY: [CONLANG] OT Syntax

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