Tobias Scheer EGG Constanta July 2010

Modularity and its generative offenders II Tobias Scheer EGG Constanta July 2010

Typology of offenders and offences

Typology of offenders • type of offence • domain specificity is offended by • diacritics • reference to untranslated morpho-syntactic information severity of offence • weak offenders those who work on a modular basis where morpho-syntax and phonology are clearly distinct ontological spaces and computational systems but allow for direct reference to morpho-syntactic information • strong offenders the existence of distinct computational systems is either unclear or overtly denied

Typology of offenders type of offence • diacritic offenders everybody • untranslated information offenders - SPE - Direct Syntax - OT • theories that respect translation - Prosodic Phonology

Typology of offenders severity of offence • weak offenders - SPE - Direct Syntax • strong offenders - OT - Distributed Morphology (PF Movement) - [HPSG – non-generative]

SPE

SPE • clear modular background, not made explicit, though • inverted T cum “all concatenation before all interpretation” • readjustment component • general mapping algorithm: boundaries

SPE • clear modular background, not made explicit, though "The rules of the grammar operate in a mechanical fashion; one may think of them as instructions that might be given to a mindless robot, incapable of exercising any judgment or imagination in their application. Any ambiguity or inexplicitness in the statement of rules must in principle be eliminated, since the receiver of the instructions is assumed to be incapable of using intelligence to fill in gaps or to correct errors." Chomsky & Halle (1968:60)

SPE

SPE • readjustment: cat-rat-cheese "Consider, for example, sentences such as (124), where the three bracketed expressions are the three noun phrases in the predicate: (124) This is [the cat that caught [the rat that stole [the cheese]]] Clearly, the intonational structure of the utterance does not correspond to the surface structure in this case. Rather, the major breaks are after cat and rat ; that is, the sentence is spoken as the three-part structure this is the cat – that caught the rat – that stole the cheese. This effect could be achieved by a readjustment rule which converts (124), with its multiply embedded sentences, into a structure where each embedded sentence is sister-adjoined in turn to the sentence dominating it. The resulting structure appears then as a conjunction of elementary sentences (that is, sentences without embeddings). This allows us to say that intonation breaks precede every occurrence of the category S (sentence) in the surface structure and that otherwise the ordinary rules prevail." (emphasis in original) Chomsky & Halle (1968:371f)

SPE • labelled brackets

SPE

SPE • All vowels have thus been assigned primary stress. • The rules under ‎(39) now reapply to the outer domain, and this time (39b) and (39c) are applicable: given the explicit mention of N and NP in their structural description, the former applies to the noun (but not to the NP), while the latter transforms the NP (but not the noun). • Chomsky & Halle then recur to a stress demotion convention which avoids that a given domain contains more than one primary stress: "when primary stress is placed in a certain position, then all other stresses in the string under consideration at that point are automatically weakened by one" (Chomsky & Halle 1968:16f).

OT • The OT literature is not very wordy regarding architectural issues. Kager's (1999) overview of the theory for example offers a chapter on acquisition and OT syntax, but relations of phonology with morpho-syntax are only mentioned in a sub-chapter on alignment (and the modular issue is entirely absent as far as I can see). • there are a few explicit statements where modularity is overtly denied. ==> OT is a strong modularity offender

OT "It is often tacitly assumed that there is a morphology-like component which chooses the right underlying representations and ships them off to GEN in the phonological component, complete with handy morphological annotations like 'Prefix' or 'Stem', but little effort has been spent on figuring out what this component is or how it works. In fact, while there is a growing body of work in OT syntax and OT phonology, there are still few clear ideas about how they relate to each other. Is there a classical serial relationship between the two, with an OT syntax first calculating the optimal syntactic representation, which then serves as the input to an OT phonology (perhaps stopping off at an OT morphology component in the middle)? Or is there some larger, integrated grammar, where EVAL chooses all at once the best overall combination of a phonological, a syntactic and a semantic representation?" Russell (1997:129)

OT "Most work in OT seems to have implicitly adopted this assembly-line view of the overall architecture of language. While individual modules (specifically phonology and syntax) are argued to function non-derivationally, the relationship between modules is usually assumed to be linear and directional. Each module has an input and an optimal output – the inputs come from somewhere, and the outputs go somewhere for further processing." Russell (1999:6)

OT "The mainstream generative tradition had postulated discrete modules that feed one another in a cascading arrangement: Morphology would feed Phonology which would then feed Phonetics. This hypothesis makes grossly incorrect predictions about the range of possible interactions. It predicts that Phonology could not be driven by Phonetics except perhaps indirectly via evolutionary effects that weed out phonetically ill-suited phonologies, and it predicts that Phonology may not have any effect on Morphology. The incorrectness of the first prediction has been forcefully underscored by a very productive line of work of recent years aimed to show how perceptual cues and perceptual distances are behind phenomena that have been the traditional bread and butter of phonological work. See, e.g. Hayes et al. (2004). The present article addresses the incorrectness of the second prediction, by considering syncretism – an eminently morphological phenomenon, which is nonetheless controlled by phonological factors in certain cases.“ Burzio (2007:1)

OT Direct Syntax in OT is regular and uncontradicted • Align and Wrap • interface constraints • Coloured Containment (van Oostendorp)

OT Align "The categories 'Cat1' and 'Cat2' range over the alphabets of grammatical and phonological categories, for example: (68) GrammCat: {Word, Stem, Root, Affix, …} ProsCat: {PrWd, Foot, Syllable, Mora, …} These categories can also be filled by specific morphemes in the grammars of individual languages." Kager (1999:118f, emphasis in original)

OT • Interface constraints make reference to designated morpho-syntactic categories. • e.g. Kager's (2000:146f) treatment of class 1 vs. class 2 affixes in Dutch. A constraint prevents class 1 affixes (such as -eer, -iteit) from attaching to higher positions in the tree: "NonRecStem: No Stem (affixed by -eer, -iteit etc.) immediately dominates a Stem." • In SPE, rules were commonly supplemented with a statement in prose or a diacritic in subscript that specifies to which morpho-syntactic category it applies (e.g. the compound rule or the nuclear stress rule). Interface constraints are thus the faithful reincarnation of this practice in a constraint-based environment.

OT • Interface constraints such as Faith-root and Faith-affix have been introduced by McCarthy & Prince (1995a); • further relevant literature includes Smith (1999), Borowsky (2000) and Alderete (2001). Van Oostendorp (2007:125ff) and Anttila (2002) discuss the spectrum of interface constraints. • Anttila (2002:2) also provides an overview of the particular morphological categories to which interface constraints have made reference in the literature. • Typical are more general categories such as roots, affixes, nouns, verbs, lexical vs. functional morphemes and affix classes, • but the possibility of reference to individual morphemes is also entertained (e.g. Raffelsiefen 1996:207f, Hammond 1995, Russell 1999). • finally, reference to designated morphological categories is an option that is open to all kinds of constraints: faithfulness, markedness and alignment.

OT Korean • voiceless dental stops are affricated before ‑i, provided that both segments belong to different morphemes • Alternation prohibits the existence of the slanted line under (b) (the colourless spreading line relates two items of the same colour), but not under (a) where the colourless spreading line associates an α-colour element with a β-colour item.

Typology of offenders

OT • Parallel mapping puts the Translator's Office IN the phonology • Align is interspersed with regular phonological constraints • body of constraints itself: since formulations are in prose and entirely unrestricted, they may well, and actually do, contain both phonological and morphological instructions.

OT the scrambling trope: all is one and the same • the parallel ambition of OT fosters a tendency to scramble the computation of information that belongs to different domains: morphological, phonological, phonetic and perhaps even syntactic and semantic constraints cohabitate in the same constraint chamber. • this everything-is-one perspective appears to be the default assumption in classical OT. The undifferentiated application of the anti-derivational philosophy has created this trope which the theory itself does not enforce: the piece-transporting mechanism (cyclic spell-out) could be perfectly derivational if the parallel ambition were restricted to phonology proper (the phonological module).

OT • Kager (2000) promotes scrambling: rather than considering the scrambling of phonological and morphological constraints a problem, he argues that this morpho-phonological intimacy is an advantage: the more modular contours are blurred, the better a theory fares. • "Phonological and morphological constraints are ranked together in a single hierarchy. One might argue that parallelism is the counterpart of the 'interleaving' of morphological and phonological rules in the derivational model of Lexical Phonology. However, parallel Correspondence Theory predicts a broader kind of sensitivity of morphology to phonology than is possible under interleaving Lexical Phonology. While interleaving restricts phonological sensitivity of affixation to properties that are present in the stem 'before' the affixation, the parallel model allows for sensitivity to the full range of output properties of the base-plus-affix combination." Kager (2000:123)

OT • a pervasive tendency of OT is to make distinct things indistinct – that is, to put them in the same constraint hierarchy, to intersperse them and to assess them all in one go. • John Kingston in his chapter on the interface with phonetics is explicit not only on this fact, but also on the causal relationship between the move from serial to parallel computation and the everything-is-the-same programme: • “[r]eplacing serial derivation by parallel evaluation removes the barrier to phonetic constraints being interspersed among and interacting with phonological constraints” (432) • whoever interleaves gradient phonetic constraints with categorical phonological constraints has left Saussurian and Chomskyan territory behind, where phonology is a symbolic system that works on discrete vocabulary. Kingston clearly identifies the alternatives: ‘[f]uture research will determine whether phonological and phonetic constraint evaluation are a single, integrated process, as advocated by Steriade and Flemming or instead sequential, as advocated by Zsiga’ (431).

OT body of constraints itself: • since formulations are in prose and entirely unrestricted, they may well, and actually do, contain both phonological and morphological instructions. • "These results make it hard to identify a clear dividing line between morphology and phonology. What is more, they go much further to blur the distinction than does the interleaving of phonology and morphology found in lexical phonology. In lexical phonology, each component has its own character: the entities are different, and the rules are different. In Optimality Theory, this is not necessarily the case. Alignment is the most striking example. Alignment appears to play a role in pure morphology, in pure phonology, and at the interface." Yip (1998:219)

Tobias Scheer EGG Constanta July 2010