Speaker: Erin Olson (MIT) Title: Intermediate markedness: a case for using gradual OT learners Date: Monday, March 7th Time: 5-6:30 Place: 32-D831
In the phonological acquisition literature, it has been observed that there are some children who acquire marked structures of the target language in a two-step fashion: they go through a stage where they are only able to produce the marked structure in some privileged position(s) within the word before being able to produce that structure in the full range of positions allowed in the target language. It is commonly assumed that the intermediate stage is due to the ranking Positional Faithfulness >> Markedness >> General Faithfulness (Tessier 2009). However, if this characterization is adopted, gradual OT learners such as the GLA (Boersma 1997, Magri 2012) will not predict that children should ever go through such a stage (Jesney & Tessier 2007, 2008; Tessier 2009). This failure to predict an intermediate stage has been used to argue that gradual OT learners either must be modified (Tessier 2009) or abandoned in favour of using HG (Jesney & Tessier 2007, 2008).
In this talk, I will show that gradual OT learners as currently formulated are capable of predicting such stages, so long as positional Markedness is an option for their characterization. I will also examine cases where description of a privileged position within the word cannot be reduced to positional Markedness, and will show that while reference to positional Faithfulness can still guide children’s productions, it can do so while ranked much lower than would be necessary under previous analyses. Since gradual OT learners can properly model such intermediate stages, their existence should not be used as an argument for preferring one learning algorithm over another.