Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T18:01:05.914Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Optimality Theory and variable word-final deletion in Faetar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2009

Naomi Nagy
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Bill Reynolds
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand

Abstract

We examine a pattern of end-of-word deletion in Faetar, a Francoprovençal dialect spoken in southern Italy, considering synchronic variants like [brókələ] ˜ [brókəl] ˜ [brókə] ˜ [brok] ‘fork’. We use the word “deletion” as a synchronic description of the facts; speakers do not always phonetically produce everything in the input form, assuming that the input form is the longest form ever produced. Optimality Theory accounts for this type of variation by positing different rankings of the constraint hierarchy, each of which produces a different optimal output. The predication of alternate constraint rankings within a single dialect, however, poses problems for Optimality Theory as it has been formulated, necessitating numerous grammars for each speaker. We propose floating constraints (Reynolds, 1994), whereby some particular constraint within a single grammar may be represented as falling anywhere within a designated range in the ranking hierarchy. In a previous study (Reynolds & Nagy, 1994) we showed that this model accounts for the distribution of types of output forms produced. Here, we analyze a corpus of 624 tokens from 40 speakers and show that the pattern of distribution of tokens is accounted for as well: the number of rankings that produce each output form is closely correlated to the number of output forms that occur in the data set.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Amery, Henry, & Cartwright, Stephen. (1987). First 100 words. London: Usborne.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1990). The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2: 205254.Google Scholar
Liberman, Mark Y. (1993). Optionality and optimality. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J., & Prince, Alan S. (1993a). Prosodic morphology I: Constraint interaction and satisfaction. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J., & Prince, Alan S. (1993b). Generalized alignment. In Booij, G. & van Marie, J. (Eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1993. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 79153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagy, Naomi. (1992). A prosodic description of Faetar. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Nagy, Naomi.(1994). Language contact and change: Italian (?) geminates in Faetar. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 9. Forthcoming.Google Scholar
Nagy, Naomi.(1996). Language contact and language change in the Faetar speech community. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan S., & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Bill. (1994). Variation and phonological theory. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Bill, & Nagy, Naomi (1994). Phonological variation in Faetar: An optimality account. In Beals, Katharine, Denton, Jeanette, Knippen, Robert, Melnar, Lynette, Suzuki, Hisami, & Zeinfeld, Erica (Eds.), Chicago Linguistic Society 30–11: The parasession on variation in linguistic theory. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 277292.Google Scholar