Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus (410-516-5250/office phone)
Thursday, February 8, 2007
3:30 p.m.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Power of Weighted Constraints
A central tenet of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) is that linguistic constraints are ranked, rather than numerically weighted (cf. Harmonic Grammar; Legendre et al. 1990, Smolensky and Legendre 2006). Prince and Smolensky adopt ranking to restrict the power of the theory. As Legendre et al. (2006) show, weighted constraints can yield unattested systems that ranked constraints are unable to produce.
This talk begins by reassessing the power of weighted constraints in light of modifications that have been proposed to OT since Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004). The conclusion is that if a theory with weighted constraints incorporates amendments that serve to make OT properly local (e.g. Eisner 1998, McCarthy 2003, 2006), many, if not all of the pathological systems are eliminated.
In the second part of the talk, I discuss two arguments in favor of weighted constraints. The first is that weighting allows scalar generalizations to be expressed with unitary constraints, rather than with sets of constraints in fixed rankings (or in stringency relations). The second is that weighted constraints may have learnability advantages, especially for gradual learning, and for learning of variation.
References
Eisner, Jason. 1998. Foot-Form decomposed: Using primitive constraints in OT. In Proceedings of SCIL VIII , ed. Benjamin Bruening, number 31 in MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 115–143. Cambridge, MA. URL http://cs.jhu.edu/ ̃jason/papers/#scil96.
Legendre, Géraldine, Yoshiro Miyata, and Paul Smolensky. 1990. Harmonic Grammar – a formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic wellformedness: Theoretical foundations. In Proceedings of the twelfth annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 388–395. Cambridge, MA: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Legendre, Géraldine, Antonella Sorace, and Paul Smolensky. 2006. The Optimality Theory–Harmonic Grammar connection. In Smolensky and Legendre (2006), 903–966.
McCarthy, John J. 2003. OT constraints are categorical. Phonology 20:75–138.
McCarthy, John J. 2006. Restraint of analysis. In Wondering at the natural fecundity of things: Essays in honor of Alan Prince, chapter 10. Linguistics Research Center. URL http://repositories.cdlib.org/lrc/prince/10.
Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 1993/2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Technical Report, Rutgers University and University of Colorado at Boulder, 1993. Revised version published by Blackwell, 2004.
Smolensky, Paul, and Géraldine Legendre. 2006. The harmonic mind: From neural computation to Optimality-Theoretic grammar, volume I: cognitive architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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