Optimal Interleaving: Serial Phonology-Morphology Interaction in a Constraint-Based Model
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
OPTIMAL INTERLEAVING: SERIAL PHONOLOGY-MORPHOLOGY INTERACTION IN A CONSTRAINT-BASED MODEL A Dissertation Presented by MATTHEW ADAM WOLF Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2008 Department of Linguistics © Copyright by Matthew Adam Wolf 2008 All Rights Reserved OPTIMAL INTERLEAVING: SERIAL PHONOLOGY-MORPHOLOGY INTERACTION IN A CONSTRAINT-BASED MODEL A Dissertation Presented by MATTHEW A. WOLF Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________ John J. McCarthy, Chair ____________________________________ Joseph V. Pater, Member ____________________________________ Elisabeth O. Selkirk, Member ____________________________________ Mark H. Feinstein, Member ___________________________________ Elisabeth O. Selkirk, Head Department of Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’ve learned from my own habits over the years that the acknowledgements are likely to be the most-read part of any dissertation. It is therefore with a degree of trepidation that I set down these words of thanks, knowing that any omissions or infelicities I might commit will be a source of amusement for who-knows-how-many future generations of first-year graduate students. So while I’ll make an effort to avoid cliché, falling into it will sometimes be inevitable—for example, when I say (as I must, for it is true) that this work could never have been completed without the help of my advisor, John McCarthy. John’s willingness to patiently hear out half-baked ideas, his encyclopedic knowledge of the phonology literature, his almost unbelievably thorough critical eye, and his dogged insistence on making the vague explicit have made this dissertation far better, and far better presented, than I could have hoped to achieve on my own. Joe Pater provided invaluable assistance through his reliable talent for noticing important connections and implications which no one else would have. My conversations with Lisa Selkirk resulted in major improvements in the exposition of the thesis, and brought many important foundational questions to the surface which would otherwise have remained dormant. With Mark Feinstein I had valuable exchanges regarding the place of my theory within a broader cognitive picture. The basic idea pursued in this thesis—putting spell-out and phonology in one tableau—was born in an independent study on morphological theory with Peggy Speas. Gaja Jarosz, John Kingston, Chris Potts, and Ellen Woolford also provided helpful iv comments related to material contained herein. Chris Potts and Lyn Frazier deserve special thanks for overseeing the torturously over-long writing of my second generals paper. It was a privilege to work with Kyle Johnson the first time that I TAed Linguistics 201. My other teachers Angelika Kratzer, Tom Roeper, and Yorghos Tripodis helped make me a more well-rounded linguist. My undergraduate linguistics teachers, in particular Bill Badecker, Luigi Burzio, Robert Frank, and Paul Smolensky, helped lay the earliest foundations for this project. My fellow phonology students have made UMass a great place to do what I do. Leah Bateman, Michael Becker, Tim Beechey, Emily Elfner, Kathryn Flack, Elena Innes, Shigeto Kawahara, Mike Key, Wendell Kimper, Kathryn Pruitt, Anne-Michelle Tessier, and Adam Werle deserve particular thanks. Outside the phonology world, Rajesh Bhatt, Tom Braden, Shai Cohen, Amy Rose Deal, Andrew McKenzie, Barbara Partee, Helen Stickney, and Youri Zabbal helped in their different ways to make the grad school experience nicer. Tim Beechey, Ilaria Frana, Vincent van Gerven-Oei, Tanja Heizmann, Keir Moulton, and Florian Schwarz were excellent company to have during the roller- coaster ride of first year. Many parts of this dissertation owe a significant debt to the assistance of phonologists from beyond UMass. The ‘once/always’ and ‘only one way of deriving counts’ predictions of the account of non-derived environment blocking in chapter 4 were identified by Donca Steriade. The analyses of Dyirbal and Pitjantjatjara in chapter 2 are adapted from my chapter ‘Lexical insertion occurs in the phonological component’ (Wolf to appear), which is forthcoming in Understanding Allomorphy: Perspectives from OT, edited by Bernard Tranel, whom I thank for inviting me to v contribute to the volume. The same material was presented in somewhat different form at the 15th Manchester Phonology Meeting, where I received valuable feedback from Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Patrik Bye, Bruce Morén, Mary Paster, Jochen Trommer, and Christian Uffman. Marc van Oostendorp also shared interesting comments on the chapter. I had fruitful discussions of NDEB and allomorph selection with Joan Mascaró. I presented portions of chapter 3 at Reed College in April 2008, where I received many helpful comments and questions, especially from Matt Pearson. Over the years, I’ve also had valuable exchanges about various aspects of the phonology/morphology interface with Adam Albright, Lev Blumenfeld, Luigi Burzio, Paul de Lacy, Melissa Frazier, Gillian Gallagher, Bruce Hayes, Ania Łubowicz, Ehren Reilly, Curt Rice, Patricia Shaw, and Paul Smolensky. At HUMDRUM 2006 at Johns Hopkins, I also had the chance to get comments on a (very) early version of the dissertation’s core proposal from Alan Prince and Bruce Tesar. Extra-special thanks are due to Elizabeth Zsiga and everyone else at Georgetown for offering me a job, which provided crucial motivation for getting this thing finished. Kathy Adamczyk, Sarah Vega-Liros, Lynne Ballard, and Tom Maxfield cannot be thanked enough for their many acts of administrative help. Pages could be filled describing the ways in which Karen Jesney helped keep me level-headed throughout the dissertation process, and the many times when she patiently put up with me when I couldn’t keep myself from coming unhinged. Her intellectual assistance was just as valuable. My parents were unfailing in their willingness to help me in every way that I asked, even as I retreated further and further into the cocoon of late-stage dissertating. The completion of this work was made vi immeasurably easier by a University of Massachusetts University fellowship, which allowed me to focus full-time on this project for the last twelve months. I am eternally in awe of everyone who has ever completed a Ph.D. on time while also teaching in their dissertation year. vii ABSTRACT OPTIMAL INTERLEAVING: SERIAL PHONOLOGY-MORPHOLOGY INTERACTION IN A CONSTRAINT-BASED MODEL SEPTEMBER 2008 MATTHEW ADAM WOLF, B.A., THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor John J. McCarthy This dissertation proposes a novel theory of the phonology-morphology interface called Optimal Interleaving (OI). OI is based on Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC), which is proposed by McCarthy (2007a) as a serial architecture for Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]). OI adds to OT-CC the hypothesis that morphological spell-out (Halle & Marantz 1993’s ‘vocabulary insertion’) occurs in the phonological component of the grammar. OI thus allows phonological and morphological operations to be interleaved in a fashion similar to that assumed in the theory of Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982a,b, Mohanan 1982). Chapters 2 and 3 argue that OI makes a number of correct predictions about phonologically-conditioned allomorph selection. Chiefly, OI derives the empirical generalization that allomorph selection is always opaque with respect to phonology conditioned by the competing allomorphs (Paster 2005, 2006, to appear). It does so while keeping phonologically-driven allomorphy in the phonology and governed by phonological constraints. OI therefore avoids a version of the Duplication Problem (Clayton 1976) which is faced by theories which derive the opacity generalization by viii attributing all allomorph selection to subcategorization in the morphology (Paster 2005, 2006, to appear; Bye 2007). Chapter 4 shows that OI, and more generally OT-CC, can be applied to non- derived environment blocking (NDEB: Kiparsky 1973a). It is shown that OI makes five correct predictions about NDEB which are not collectively predicted by any other theory of this phenomenon. OI achieves these results without having to make any special assumptions specific to NDEB. This places OT-CC at a considerable advantage as a theory of opacity relative to rule-based phonology, where NDEB requires stipulated restrictions on rule application like the Strict Cycle Condition (Kean 1974, Mascaró 1976). Chapter 5 shows that OI also lends itself to the two other main types of serial phonology/morphology interactions: ‘cyclic’ overapplication of a process, and underapplication of a process in a morphologically-derived environment. The chapter also critiques existing theories of these effects, particularly OO-faithfulness (Benua 1997), Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2000), and the phonological application of the theory of phases (Marvin 2002). ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................viii LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................1