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Review article

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BruceTesar (2014). Output-driven phonology: theory andlearning. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 139.)Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. Pp. xix+415.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Giorgio Magri
Giorgio Magri*
Affiliation:
CNRS, Université Paris 8 and University of Utrecht
*
*E-mail: magrigrg@gmail.com.
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Extract

In his recent bid for the presidency of the Association for Mathematics ofLanguage, Makoto Kanazawa writes:*

The scientific study of language is such a large and important field thatit's strange that so little mathematical research is beingcarried out. By comparison, the latest issue of Journal ofEconomic Theory has 14 original articles, and all but oneof them are mathematical papers in the sense of containing theorems andproofs. And the title of the journal is not ‘Journalof Mathematical Economics’, which is actually aseparate journal.1

That linguistics lags behind economics is not surprising: makingmore money is a stronger drive for change and progress than better understandingthe language faculty. But Bruce Tesar's book shows that the timemight be ripe for change and progress in our field as well. Employing a formallysophisticated analytical approach (as opposed to a purely simulation-basedapproach), the book provides a beautiful example of the interplay betweenlearnability and structural assumptions on the typological space. It thus showsthat computational phonology has become a mature subfield of generativelinguistics.

Information

Type
Review Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , December 2014 , pp. 525 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

Alderete, John, Brasoveanu, Adrian, Prince, Nazarré Merchant, Alan & Tesar, Bruce (2005). Contrast analysis aids the learning of phonological underlying forms. WCCFL 24. 34–42.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (2004). Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: the early stages. In Kager et al. (2004). 158–203.Google Scholar
Kager, René (1999). Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) (2004). Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Merchant, Nazarré (2008). Discovering underlying forms: contrast pairs and ranking. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Merchant, Nazarré & Tesar, Bruce (2008). Learning underlying forms by searching restricted lexical subspaces. CLS 41:2. 33–47.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan (2002). Entailed ranking arguments. Ms, Rutgers University. Available as ROA-500 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Tesar, Bruce (2004). Learning phonotactic distributions. In Kager et al. (2004). 245–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesar, Bruce (2006). Faithful contrastive features in learning. Cognitive Science 30. 863–903.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tesar, Bruce, Alderete, John, Horwood, Graham, Nishitani, Nazarré Merchant, Koichi & Prince, Alan (2003). Surgery in language learning. WCCFL 22. 477–490.Google Scholar
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