Speaker: Eyal Marco (Tel-Aviv University)
Title: Optimal Paradigms: A challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic
Time: Monday, September 30th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: In this talk we will reevaluate Optimal Paradigms (OP), an extension to Optimality Theory proposed by McCarthy (2005). In OP, candidates are full inflectional paradigms and faithfulness constraints can require uniformity between all members within a candidate. According to OP, prosodic templates are not grammatical entities, and morphosyntactic categories like noun and verb are not available to the phonology. Instead, systematic phonological differences between categories are derived by special constraints that require uniformity between all members of an inflectional paradigm. One of the original cases McCarthy used to showcase OP with, comes from Moroccan Arabic. McCarthy proposed that a noun-verb asymmetry in the distribution of schwa in Moroccan Arabic can be predicted by OP using the different paradigm structures of nouns and verbs in the language. We will reevaluate this proposal using new fieldwork data from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, an endangered variety of Arabic that is closely related to Moroccan. We will see that if adjectives are added to the picture, OP can no longer predict the distribution of schwa in the different categories. The conclusion is that OP does not eliminate the necessity of templates or category reference in phonology, disputing the main original motivation for the theory.