Analyzing Sound Patterns An Introduction to Phonology

Introduction

Up to this chapter, we have approached the sound patterns of human languages from the perspective of rules. One shared characteristic of the rule approaches including the templatic view of syllabification and epenthesis is that they generate only the attested patterns of a language. Unattested patterns cannot be derived. This is accomplished by the rules as well as the conditions, which restrict what rules can generate. An example of a condition on rules is Coda-Filter introduced in Chapter 10, which blocks a rule from syllabifying a consonant as a coda if this consonant has an independent place of articulation. We shift the focus from this chapter and introduce a drastically different approach to the analysis of sound patterns. Unlike the earlier rule approaches, this theory does not block the unattested patterns. The attested and unattested patterns, referred to as candidates, are all submitted for evaluation. Rather than generating the attested patterns through rules, this approach relies on a set of ranked constraints to select the best or optimal candidate out of competing candidates. Under this approach, the optimal form selected by the constraints is the attested form. This approach is known as Optimality Theory (OT). We show that OT does away with rules. Instead, it elevates conditions such as Coda-Filter to a central role in the analysis.

This chapter has three objectives. First, it introduces OT, a theory of language and linguistic analysis that has become very popular since the earlier 1990s. Second, this chapter develops your ability to conduct linguistic analyses, in particular, to analyze sound patterns using OT. Lastly, by presenting an optimal-theoretic analysis of syllabification and epenthesis in Ponapean, this chapter develops your ability to analyze the same phonological phenomena from multiple perspectives and to compare and evaluate competing analyses.