test questions (OT) midterm

Question 1

[I give you a filled-out tableau.] What is the optimal candidate in this tableau and why?

Answer 1

look at which one has the least violation marks in the higher constraints

Question 2

[I give you a filled-out tableau and a specific candidate.] Is there a way to re-rank these constraints so that this candidate wins?

Answer 2

should be self explanatory

Question 3

[I give you a tableau that doesn’t have the violation marks, but I also give you constraints and their definitions.] Explain how these candidates violate or don’t violate each constraint.

Answer 3

should be self explanatory

Question 4

[I give you a filled-out tableau.] Is there some other candidate not included on this tableau that would have been better than any of the choices shown here?

Answer 4

think about a candidate that wouldn’t break any of the constraints already broken by the top candidate

Question 5

[I give you a schematic constraint ranking.] Explain what phonological pattern you would expect to arise from this constraint ranking and why.

Answer 5

Full Contrast:
F»M(c-s)»M(c-f)
F»M(c-f)»M(c-s)

Pos. Neutralization:
M(c-s)»F»M(c-f)

Allophony:
M(c-s)»M(c-f)»F

No Variation (or complete neutralization)
M(c-f)»F»M(c-s)
M(c-f)»M(c-s)»F

Question 6

explain (with example) what no Variation (or complete neutralization) is and whats its schematic ranking would be. explain the schematic ranking

Answer 6

when you never see a certain segment surface.
CFM»CSM»F
CFM»F»CSM
no matter what is ranked below, if CFM is ranked first whatever segment is incurring a violation will never surface.

ex. if we have *NasalVowel as CFM which says assign a violation every time there is a nasal vowel, we will never see a nasal vowel surface.

Question 7

explain (with example) what allophony is and whats its schematic ranking would be. explain the schematic ranking

Answer 7

allophony is when there are segments in complementary distribution, aka it is predictable because the sounds never occur in the same enviornment.
CSM»CFM»F

csm needs to be ranked highest because allophony is based on sounds occuring in specific enviornments. To account for these specific environments in place, segments often change from UR to SR to fit these environment requirements, therefore are often violating faithfulness.

Question 8

explain (with example) what positional neutralization is and whats its schematic ranking would be. explain the schematic ranking

Answer 8

positional neutralization is when two sounds are mostly unpredictable (contrast) but are predictable (neutralize to context B) in one environment.
CSM»F»CFM

we need CSM ranked highest because without it, the sounds would just contrast. we need that one specific enviornment where the sounds are unpredictable.

Question 9

explain (with example) what full contrast is and whats its schematic ranking would be. explain the schematic ranking

Answer 9

full contrast is when the sounds are fully unpredictable and are contrasting.

F»CSM»CFM
F»CFM»CSM

faithfulness is first no matter the other rankings because it is always faithful to the input. nothing is changing in terms of creating predictable environments in certain places.

ex. /cat/ and /bat/ in english are minimal pairs and are fully contrastive

Question 10

[I give you description of a phonological pattern, something like “In Language X, voiced and voiceless stops can both occur word initially, but only voiceless stops can occur after [s].”] Explain what kind of ranking of standard OT constraints you would need to account for this pattern.

Answer 10

name the standard constraints
think back to factorial typology
rank them according to whether the pattern described is contrast, positional or full neutralization, or allophony

-in this example its describing allophonic variation, so the ranking would be
CSM»CFM»F

Question 11

[I give you a set of phonological constraints for one of the datasets on the handout, like Yowlumne, Mokilese, or Black ASL.] Explain what the correct ranking of constraints would be for this dataset and why.

Answer 11

look for patterns of alllophony, full contrast, pos. neutralization, and no variation (full neutralization)
figure out ranking accordingly

Question 12

Explain why it is that unpredictable information is stored in underlying forms, using at least one concrete example

Answer 12

For example, given we know that /pæt/ and /bæt/ (a minimal pair) exist in English, if only given the sequence /æt/ we can’t predict whether the first sound will be [p] or [b] because these sounds are contrastive in English.
we must include every segment of /pæt/ in the UR because there’s no way to tell otherwise what it will surface as.

In contrast, if needing to choose between [p] vs [ph] for the sequence /æt/ we do have markedness constraints making one candidate better than the other because these sounds are predictable in english.

Question 13

Explain why putting faithfulness at the top of a constraint ranking will allow for surface forms that show phonological contrasts.

Answer 13

High-ranking faithfulness constraints ensure that distinctive phonological features remain intact. For example, if /b/ and /p/ are underlying forms, ranking faithfulness above markedness will maintain their contrast in the surface form, leading to outputs like [bɪg] and [pɪg]. If faithfulness was not ranked first these sounds may not contrast, and instead show positional neutralization.

• avoids positional neutralization of phonological contrasts (e.g., merging /b/ and /p/ into a single sound) are avoided.

Question 14

Explain how you decide what the underlying form of a morpheme is when doing an Optimality Theoretic analysis.

Answer 14

-lexical optimization:
assume input form is the same as output form if you don’t have contradicting evidence

OR if that doesn’t work:
based on which sound is predictable vs which one is not
-the unpredictable one will be the sound that has the harder environment to describe, ie. it’s the “else” environment. this will be UR because the UR stores unpredictable information

Question 15

Explain why the sequence CVCV will be predicted to be syllabified as CV.CV and not CVC.V even in a language that does allow CVC syllables

Answer 15

Principle of onset maximisation, which reinforces the universal syllable structure of CV.

*look at week 6/7 syllable ranking chart. it occurs the least amount of violations

Question 16

[I give you a sequence of consonants and vowels, like CVCCVC.] Explain how this sequence would be syllabified and why.

Answer 16

look at 6/7 syllable ranking chart

it seems 2 diff syllabic versions have the same amount of violations, maybe its dependent on language

Question 17

[I give you the dataset for Yowlumne or Attic Greek.] Explain what phonological process this language employs to guarantee ‘good’ syllabification and how you know, using at least one concrete example.

Answer 17

Describe the largest syllable shape
then describe how Yowlumne epenthesis and Attic Greek deletes

Question 18

Explain one phenomenon that an OT-style approach to phonology can better handle than a rule-based approach. [Note: we briefly touched on that today, but we’ll come back to it in later classes, so don’t worry too much if you’re not yet sure how to answer this question.]

Answer 18

OT style can make cross-linguistic predictions (typological predictions, ie. what is possible vs what is not possible in a language)

eg. Syllable structure predictions
every language has CV structure
if a lang allows complex onsets then it allows simple onsets
If lang allows complex codas, then it allows simple codas

Rule based makes predictions for only language specific phenomena

Question 19

Explain some of the key similarities and differences between a rule-based and a constraint-based approach to doing phonology.

Answer 19

similarities:
both use phonological features
both describe how to get from UR to SR

differences:
rules are lang specific
temporally ordered (ie. they apply one at a time in a specific order)
rules cannot be violated
SR is a consequence of the rules
OT
constraints are language universals; langs just rank their importance differently
no temporal ordering of constraints application, all apply at once
constraints will be violated
SR is a goal orientated approach. If we want the SR to have certain qualities, we must rank the constraints accordingly

Question 20

Explain the difference between Faithfulness and Markedness constraints.
[I give you an example of a constraint and its Kager-style definition.] Re-define this constraint to be clearer and explain why the new version is clearer.

Answer 20

markedness looks at the output only and seeks to make things match the constraint
faithfulness compare the input with the output and resists any changes in order to keep the input and output as identical as possible

Question 21

[I give you an input and an output form.] Explain which elements are in correspondence between these two forms and what has changed between them.

Answer 21

look at the subscript numbers
it could be deletion
change in linear order
maybe there was a voicing change

Question 22

[I give you one of the languages in #4, #6, or #8 on the Week 6-7 handout.] Explain what kind of syllable structure this language allows and what phonological process (if any) it uses to enforce that syllable structure.

Answer 22

Ex. #4 allows CV as maximum syllable type, this is achieved through epenthesis
/pao/ becomes [pa.to]

Question 23

[I give you one of the languages as described in #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, or #9 on the Week 6-7 handout.] Explain what the constraint ranking of Onset, NoCoda, Dep-IO, and Max-IO would have to be to get a language like this.

Answer 23

For the language in #4 on the handout, the ranking would be Onset, NoCoda, Max-IO&raquo_space; Dep-IO
This is because the language requires epenthesis to maintain a CV syllable structure, so Dep-IO has to be ranked last

Question 24

[I give you a particular constraint ranking for the four constraints Onset, NoCoda, Dep-IO, and Max-IO.] Explain what type of language this would end up giving you (in terms of its syllable structure and phonological processes used to enforce that syllable structure).

Answer 24

taken from example 7, Onset, DEP-IO&raquo_space; Max-IO&raquo_space; No coda would get us the cvc structure via deletion rather than epenthesis since it is ranked higher than MAX
then for 4-7 repeat for any cvc data that
if a lang doesn’t delete codas, rank it the lowest
if a lang epenthesis, rank dep above max
if a lang deletes, rank max above dep
for 8-10, use a 2x2 tableau maybe

Question 25

Explain why the input /pao/ won’t ever result in the output form [pa.to.to], even in a language where strict CV syllable structure is enforced.

Answer 25

[pa.to] and [pa.to.to] both only violate epenthesis, but [pa.to.to] violates it three times
Because of the notion of economy, the SR [pa.to] will always be preferred over [pa.to.to] because it only violates epenthesis once. Even though epenthesis is ranked last, we want to limit the amount of epenthesis that occurs.

Question 26

Explain why there might in some cases be multiple constraint rankings of the four constraints Onset, NoCoda, Dep-IO, and Max-IO that would result in the same type of language (in terms of the syllable structure and phonological processes used to enforce that syllable structure).

Answer 26

Say onset, NoCoda, Dep-IO were all ranked above Max-IO with the commas like ( onset, NoCoda, Dep-IO,&raquo_space; Max-IO) this could be rearranged into 6 possible rankings that are all basically saying that the language cant have deletion. So maybe in terms of syllable structure this would make complex onsets and codas more common idk that was probably a bad example but u get the point

Question 27

[I give you a 2x2 tableau from #8 on the Week 6-7 handout.] Explain how the two given constraints should be ranked for this language and how you know.

Answer 27

show how switching the two constraints would cause the wrong candidate to win thereby indicating that constraint 1&raquo_space; constraint 2

Question 28

Explain why it’s sometimes not possible to rank constraints with respect to each other, giving at least one concrete example.

Answer 28

-if 2 or more constraints are never violated, you know they go at the top of the ranking, but you can’t rank one over the other. (need dotted lines)

eg. cv structures have no ordering bc the number of violations for other structures are all the same, indicating that there is no one order that is better than the other (see number 1 a & b on week 6&7 handout)
they all apply at the same time for something like syllable structure

Question 29

Explain one way to determine what the highest-ranking constraint for a language is.

Answer 29

More generally, if a constraint is never violated, by any of the surface forms we see in the lang, then it will be the highest ranked.
give example

Question 30

[I give you a 2x2 tableau.] Explain whether this 2x2 tableau is valid in terms of proving the ranking between these two constraints.

Answer 30

The tableau would be valid if, with the constraint order switched, the opposite output would become the optimal candidate.
The tableau would not be valid if, with the constraint order switched, the same output would remain the optimal candidate.

Question 31

Explain why the prosodic word in a surface form might be different from the grammatical word in that form, using at least one concrete example.

Answer 31

prosofic form = surface from of an item (regardless of correspondence) including syllable structure

gramm word = the part of the surface from that is in correspondence w the input (the UR)

this doesn’t include epenthesized elements because they have no correspondent in UR
deleted segments don’t matter here bc they won’t appear in the surface form therefore they don’t
eg. /opaft/ [o.paf.ti]
gramm: opaft
pros: o.paf.ti
the epenthesized [i] has no correspondent in the UR so it is not included in gramm

Question 32

[I give you an example input form and its output form.] Explain what the grammatical word is in this output. [Note: in a question like this, it’s important not just to tell me what the grammatical word is but actually to explain how you know, e.g. by first defining the concept of a grammatical word.]

Answer 32

gramm word = the part of the surface from that is in correspondence w the input (the UR)
Ex. input: /opaft/ output: [to.paft] gramm.word: [opaft]

Question 33

[I give you an example input form and its output form.] Explain what the prosodic word is in this output.

Answer 33

prosofic form = surface from of an item (regardless of correspondence) including syllable structure
Ex. input: /opaft/ output: [to.paft] prosodic word: [to.paft]

Question 34

[I give you an example input form and its output form.] Explain whether the grammatical and the prosodic word are the same or not in this output and why.

Answer 34

*define terms
Ex. in the example input: /opaft/ output: [to.paft], the gramm. and pros. word would not be the same.

Question 35

[I give you an example input form and its output form, along with a specific alignment constraint.] Explain whether this output form violates or satisfies this alignment constraint, and if it violates it, how many violations it would have. [Note: an example of a specific alignment constraint would be something like: Align(Morph, L, Syll, L) or Align(PrWd, R, GrWd, R), etc.]

Answer 35

dependent on question

ketab

ke.ptab

Align(PrWd, R, GrWd, R), etc.]

Question 36

Explain the general purpose of having Alignment constraints as part of Optimality Theory.

Answer 36

alignment constraints tell us where epenethesized elements will go

it helps disambiguate cases where we could epenthesize in like 3 diff spots due to a massive consonant cluster or smt
Having DEP-IO and the other elements governing syllable structure is not enough to predict where epenthesis will happen, so in order to to be clear, we can rank what a language prefers when aligning syllable and morpheme edges.