Aaron Kaplan

Noniterativity is an Emergent Property of Grammar

Rutgers University Community Repository (Rutgers University) · 2008-01-01 · 107 citations

Many rule-based theories of phonology include an iterativity parameter so that rules can either be stipulated to apply as many times as possible or restricted to a single application. Optimality Theory cannot replicate this simple device: Constraints that produce iterativity (Agree, Align, Spread, Parse ...) do not produce noniterativity with a simple parameter switch. Furthermore, OT's architecture prevents the generation of true noniterativity: In order to determine whether or not a feature ha…

Positional faithfulness in Harmonic Grammar

Journal of Linguistics · 2018-02-26 · 104 citations

In Tamil, coronals are licensed in onsets and initial syllables, exemplifying what Jesney (2011b) calls Licensing in Multiple Contexts (LMC). Jesney shows that while only positional faithfulness produces LMC in Optimality Theory, positional licensing provides a competing analysis of LMC in Harmonic Grammar (HG). This suggests that positional faithfulness may not be necessary in HG. We argue, though, that positional faithfulness remains essential. First, other facts in Tamil are incompatible with…

Harmonic Improvement without Candidate Chains in Chamorro

Linguistic Inquiry · 2011-10-01 · 86 citations

This article argues that some ostensible advantages of Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC) over classic OT are actually liabilities. OT-CC correctly predicts that Chamorro umlaut occurs only when trigger and target are adjacent. But OT-CC is incompatible with similar phenomena like Central Venetan metaphony, and attempts to modify OT-CC to produce metaphony impair the theory's handling of umlaut. Classic OT provides a superior approach: constraints grounded in prominence asymmetries…

Categorical and Gradient Ungrammaticality in Optional Processes

Language · 2021 · 84 citations

Current theories of optionality often take a gradient view of grammaticality: unattested variants are not categorically excluded but rather highly improbable. Vowel harmony in Eastern Andalusian challenges this view. Unstressed vowels optionally harmonize in a coordinated fashion. For example, if one posttonic vowel harmonizes, they all must. Different implementations of NOISY HARMONIC GRAMMAR are tested for their ability to account for this pattern. Only the implementation that categorically ex…

Inter- and intra-speaker variation in French schwa

Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2016-07-15 · 48 citations

Quantitative constraint-based theories of optionality typically aim to model the frequency with which an individual speaker’s grammar maps one input onto various output forms. But existing studies in this area use population-level frequency data as a proxy for the frequencies produced by an individual speaker’s grammar. This practice is problematic for three reasons. First, population-level variation could result from aggregation over individuals with differing categorical behavior, not individu…