DM and John J. McCarthy

[Heidi Harley]

Hi all!

Just a quick note w/r to Sasson's remarks about McCarthy's thoughts on
DM as the input to OT phonology -- My student Jason Haugen a few (ok,
well, 9) years ago wrote one of his prelim papers on precisely this
topic, making a convincing (to me) case that treating DM outputs as OT
inputs was a plausible approach to the morphology/phonology interface;
especially if you're in an OT world with co-phonologies for subpatterns
in the lexicon, etc. Not sure about how it would work with prosodic
phonolgoy, though. And he didn't assume that VI insertion was
accomplished by an OT mechanism.

Jason, are you out there on this list? You might think about making that
paper available on lingbuzz or similar for interested parties to have a
look at.

and thanks to Martha for reviving the list!

all the best, hh

You wrote:

> DM and OT are not Usually going together. Interestingly, in th erecent
> article called "Pausal Phonology and Morpheme Realization", John McCarthy is
> taking OUTPUT of Distributed Morphology to be INPUT to OT phonology.
>
> Quotation from McCarthy's article :
>
>       " Realizational theories of morphology,
>       such as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993),
>       assume that the phonological forms of morphemes are
>       the result of processes that spell-out morphosyntactic features. "
>
>
> In the article, McCarthuy is trying to explore how a version of OT  known as
> "Harmonic Serialism" can work with DM, suggesting (folowing Wolf's 2008
> dissertation) that DM's Vocabulary Insertion is actually being performed by
> Phonology module. They call it "Optimal Interleaving".
>
> Each time a Vocabulary Item needs to be inserted instead of a morpheme, the
> Items compete in and the "optimal" Item is the one resembling the  morpheme'
> features the most.  Then phonology "harmonizes" the intermediate result
> before adding the next Vocabulary Item, etc.
>
>
>
> Sasson Margaliot



--
Heidi Harley
University of Arizona
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
Tucson, AZ 85721-0028
tel. 520-820-7875 (c)
tel. 520-626-3554 (o)
fax. 520-626-9014
http://linguistics.arizona.edu/~hharley/