Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT)
Title: A Cross-linguistic Investigation of the OCP-Place
Time: Thursday 10/7, 12:30—1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
We expand the seminal work of Frisch et al. (2004) by presenting a
large scale investigation of place-driven consonant co-occurrence
restrictions (OCP-Place) in Arabic, Amharic, Aymara, Ch’ol, Dutch,
English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Javanese, Muna, Quechua,
Tagalog, Turkish and Zulu utilizing the framework of the Generalized
Linear Model. We propose a constraint set that successfully accounts
for OCP-Place and identity effects in all languages. A
markedness-based account of the cross-linguistic dispreference for
co-occurring similar consonants sharing place features and preference
for co-occurring identical consonants is presented. Concretely, it
will be shown that OCP-Place typology can be accounted for by a set of
probabilistic constraints that penalize featural co-occurrence of
similar consonant pairs according to the Similarity Metric of Natural
Classes (Frisch et al., 2004) weighted depending on the major place
feature they share (Similarity-LAB, Similarity-COR, Similarity-DOR;
contra FBP, who propose that the relative similarity of consonants
sharing different major place features follows from the organization
of the consonant inventory of the language). We also show that
identity effects are best accounted for by postulating a violable
markedness constraint penalizing non-identical pairs of consonants
(Identity; cf BeIdentical; MacEachern, 1997) but note that the domain
of this constraint must crucially be restricted to the first and
second position of a consonant template.