Inputs

[Wallace Chafe]

I'd like to expand a little on the following point made by Brian
MacWhinney:

> 4.  Even from the beginning, OT never questioned the need to provide a single
> abstract underlying structure for each lexical item.  As far as I can tell,
> this commitment is the one that tends to lead linguistic theories away from
> being able to develop psychological reality.

I've worked a lot with two polysynthetic and highly "fusional" languages
(Seneca and Caddo) that have obviously undergone a lot of phonological
change.  I'm convinced that the only way to explain/predict/understand the
shapes of their words is by reconstructing earlier forms along with the
changes that have made these forms what they are today.  Now, earlier
"derivational" approaches to phonology essentially mirrored what I've just
described in "underlying forms" and "rules" (whatever deviations there
were from historical shapes and processes were trivial).  But it seems
pretty silly to think that speakers of these languages "know" such systems
in any realistic sense.  Just how they do produce these words is a
different and fascinating question, but it seems to involve very large
memories combined with the ability to analogize.

To put it all too briefly, OT has done away with the rules but kept the
underlying forms in the guise of "inputs" to the constraints.  So I'm left
with the question of what those inputs could possibly mean when it comes
to what's going on in the minds of speakers of these languages.  It would
be easy for me to give examples, which I've done a little in a paper
called "How a Historical Linguist and a Native Speaker Understand a
Complex Morphology" in the volume Historical Linguistics 1997:  Selected
Papers From the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics
(Benjamins).  I think this is the same problem that Brian was talking
about.

Wally Chafe