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Optimality Theory and Language Change:
-discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail;
-treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish;
-shows that the application of OT allows for innovative and improved analyses;
-allows researchers that appeal to OT to see the connections of their (usually synchronic) work with diachronic studies;
-contains a complete bibliography on Optimality Theory and language change.
This volume may be used as one of the texts in courses on historical phonology or syntax that treat these topics from generative approaches or that give a general survey of various frameworks of research into these areas. Likewise, the volume may serve as a text for courses in phonology, syntax and Optimality Theory that have a component dedicated to extensions of linguistic theory to historical change. It is of interest for historical linguists, researchers into Optimality Theory and linguistic theory, and for phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.
List of contents
I: Optimality Theory And Language Change: Overview and Theoretical Issues.- Remarks on Optimality Theory and language change.- The odds of eternal optimization in Optimality Theory.- On re-ranking and explanatory adequacy in a constraint-based theory of phonological change.- The actuation problem in Optimality Theory: Phonologization, rule inversion and rule loss.- When history doesn't repeat itself: Optimality Theory and implausible sound changes.- Language change without constraint reranking.- II: Case Studies Of Phonological Change.- English vowel shifts and 'optimal' diphthongs: Is there a logical link?.- Merger avoidance and lexical reconstruction: An OT model of the Great Vowel Shift.- The emergence of quantity-sensitivity in Latin: Secondary stress, Iambic Shortening and theoretical implications for 'mixed' stress systems.- Some interactions between word, foot and syllable structure in the history of the Spanish language.- The emergence of palatal sonorants and alternating diphthongs in Old Spanish.- The emergence of contrastive palatalization in Russian.- III: Case Studies of Syntactic Change.- How to rank constraints: Constraint conflict, grammatical competition and the rise of periphrastic do.- Historical changes in verb-second and null subjects from Old to Modern French.- Bibliography on Optimality Theory and language change.- References.- Indices.- Names.- Languages.- Constraints.- Terms.
Summary
Optimality Theory and Language Change:
-discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail;
-treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish;
-shows that the application of OT allows for innovative and improved analyses;
-allows researchers that appeal to OT to see the connections of their (usually synchronic) work with diachronic studies;
-contains a complete bibliography on Optimality Theory and language change.
This volume may be used as one of the texts in courses on historical phonology or syntax that treat these topics from generative approaches or that give a general survey of various frameworks of research into these areas. Likewise, the volume may serve as a text for courses in phonology, syntax and Optimality Theory that have a component dedicated to extensions of linguistic theory to historical change. It is of interest for historical linguists, researchers into Optimality Theory and linguistic theory, and for phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.
