Interactions Between Markedness And Faithfulness Constraints In Vowel Systems

Miglio argues that to assess the relative markedness of a segment, frequency of occurrence in vowel inventories is insufficient when considered on its own. In its analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, this book elaborates a more useful model of a unitary change even in a surface-oriented theory such as optimality theory, with the help of local conjunction. Miglio extends the device of local conjunction to model opaque relations, and calls for reranking and lexicon optimization as the means to capture change within optimality theory.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume, first published in 2001, brings together work by scholars researching the details of featural phonology with optimality theory.

First published in 1999. This study developed from a dissertation in 1993, when the author undertook what she thought would be a simple Optimality Theory analysis of Shona vowel harmony. Having initially treated Shona height harmony as a case of featural alignment, akin to Kirchner's 1993 analysis of Turkish she realized that alignment constraints alone could not account for one central aspect of the Shona case: the priority of initial syllable features in determining the outcome of harmony. This volume of research outlines the authirs discoveries.

This work discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail. It treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/ Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish and shows that the application of Optimality Theory allows for innovative and improved analyses. It contains a complete bibliography on OT and language change. It is of interest to historical linguists, researchers into OT and linguistic theory, and phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.

In recent years, an increasing number of linguists have re-examined the question of whether markedness has explanatory power, or whether it is a phenomenon that begs explanation itself. This volume brings together a collection of articles with a broad range of critical viewpoints on the notion of markedness in phonological theory. The contributions span a variety of phonological frameworks and relate to morphosyntax, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics, biolinguistics, and language typology. This volume will be of particular interest to phonologists of both synchronic and diachronic persuasions and has strong implications for the architecture of grammar with respect to phonology and its interfaces with morphosyntax and phonetics.

This book is the first detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories. It also includes the first quantitative study of phonation types in Khoesan languages, and the first study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around. Although bases of OCP constraints have been presumed to be perceptual, this is the first quantitative study showing the acoustic basis of a particular OCP constraint in a specific language. Amanda L. Miller-Ockhuizen describes the phonetics and phonology of gutturals in the Khoesan language of Ju|'hoansi. Hers is the first study of voice quality cues associated with epiglottalized vowels. Thus, it is the first study to show that laryngeal and pharyngeal vowels are unified phonetically by non-modal voice qualities associated with them. It is also the first study to show that in addition to laryngeal coarticulation, whereby voice quality cues associated with laryngeal consonants are spread to a following vowel, pharyngeal coarticulation also involves spreading of voice quality cues. Thus, guttural consonants are united in that they all spread voice quality cues onto a following vowel. Voice quality cues found on vowels following guttural consonants are as large as similar cues associated with guttural vowels. This acoustic similarity is shown to be the basis of a novel Guttural OCP constraint found in the language, which is demonstrated to exist via co-occurrence patterns found over a recorded database of all of the known roots. Thus, this is the first book to provide a detailed perceptual basis of an OCP constraint. The database study also reports several other novel phonotactic constraints involving gutturals, as well as a reanalysis of the well-known Back Vowel Constraint. This book describes both phonetics and phonology of the natural class of guttural consonants, and shows through a quantitative acoustic investigation how the phonetic cues associated with these sounds are the bases of phonotactic constraints involving them.

This new book offers research that will affect further study of tone in Vietnamese and other tonal languages.