OT and functionalism

Joan Bresnan bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Tue Dec 14 05:22:25 UTC 1999


In his posting of Monday,  13 Dec., Matthew Dryer makes the point that
functional (principles, motivations, or) constraints are external to
grammars, while OT constraints are internal to (OT) grammars.  Hence,
he believes:

> OT shares with theories in the GB tradition of trying to build explanation
> for why languages are the way they are into the grammars themselves.  From
> my perspective, this is deeply misguided.  Languages are highly complex
> systems, whose properties reflect the interaction of diverse explanatory
> principles, and I believe that they can and should be described in terms
> that are independent of the explanatory principles that underlie them.
>
> While there are a wide variety of approaches which have been labeled
> "functionalist", OT as I understand it is fundamentally incompatible with
> the type of functionalism that I and many others espouse.

This certainly sounds like an unassailable position, but that is
because it is true by definition.  If you *define* a functional
constraint to be something external to a "grammar", and you *define*
an OT "grammar" as something that contains internal constraints, then
how could his conclusion be other than true?

But I think Matthew's point betrays a misconception about what exactly an
OT grammar is.   He elaborates:

> But on my view, grammars of languages do not make reference to functional
> principles or motivations.  For example, if two languages have a
> difference that one might describe in terms of economic motivation
> competing with iconic motivation, where economic motivation wins out in
> one language and iconic motivation in the other, I would not want to say
> that there are grammatical rules in these languages that refer to economy
> or to iconicity.

OT has no grammatical rules that refer to economy or to iconicity.
Language particularity is ultimately simply a harmonic function over
the space of possible forms.  If you look inside an OT "grammar", you
find a representational basis (this is sometimes called "GEN") which
specifies the set of possible structures, and an optimizing component
(called "EVAL") which optimizes the candidate structures against the
conflicting universal constraints in such a way as to minimize
violations.  The constraint component is "external" to the structure
component.

He writes:

> To put the point another way, functional principles and motivations apply
> primarily at the level of the evolution of particular languages.  If
> economic motivation has won out over iconic motivation with respect to
> some aspect of the grammar of a particular language, that means that over
> the past few thousand years, the particular grammatical changes that have
> led to the current state of the language reflect the influence of that
> functional principle.  But once that has happened, the grammatical rules
> have an existence that is independent of the explanatory principles that
> have influenced them.

As I indicated in my reply to J. MacFarlane's message, the work of
"new functionalist" OT phonologists like Donca Steriade is based on
the hypothesis that factors such as perceptibility and avoidance of
articulatory effort "play a role in shaping sound patterns, not only
in an evolutionary sense--as argued by John Ohala and Bjorn
Lindblom--but also by defining the grammatical constraints whose
interactions yield the phonologies of individual languages."  Judith
Aissen and I believe that the same may be true in syntax: The same functionally
motivated constraints or "forces" that shape evolutionary properties
and appear in crosslinguistic typological asymmetries also emerge
within the grammars of particular languages.  We have several papers
making this point in the domain of syntax in some detail, and these
are available from our Optimal Typology Project website
(http://www-ot.stanford.edu/ot/), so I won't repeat the evidence and
arguments here.  This is what we are trying to do in our project.

I will only give one very simple example (from Rene Kager's 1999 CUP
textbook on Optimality Theory).  Across languages, voiced obstruents
are typologically marked: there are languages having only voiceless
obstruents (e.g. Polynesian), and languages having both voiced and
voiceless obstruents (e.g. English), but no (or hardly any) languages
having only voiced obstruents.  This typological asymmetry might be
explained in terms of constraints on articulatory effort and
perception that shaped the evolution of languages to explain why
voiced obstruents are more restricted crosslinguistically.  But within
the phonological components of the grammars of particular languages we
see the same thing: voiced obstruents are restricted in their
*language-internal* distributions.  For example, Dutch and German have
a voicing contrast in obstruents, which appears in syllable onsets--a
very salient position-- but voiced obstruents are devoiced in syllable
codas.  In contrast, there appear to be few or no languages whose
language-internal phonologies have a voicing contrast in syllable
codas and no voicing contrast in syllable onsets.  OT can explain the
positional neutralization of obstruent voicing in syllable codas and
relate it to the typological of segment inventories across languages.
The reason is simply that the *same* constraints reflecting ease of
perception and articulatory effort are present in the grammars of all
languages (as the universal constraint set).  No other of grammatical
theory that I know of does this.

In my work--and in Judith's--we are developing analyses of syntactic
analogues of these phonological phenomena.  (I refer you to the papers
at the website above.)  I think it's extremely exciting, and has
potential for truly integrative collaborations across the
formal/functional divide.  Of course, at the level of syntax it is
much harder to find direct perceptual and cognitive evidence for the
markedness constraints, compared to the work on phonetic perception
and articulation that Steriade and others appeal to.  There is much to
be done.  I hope that Matthew's statement of what a true functionalist
believes isn't the last word on this topic.

Joan



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