Richness of the Base and Root Fusion in Sino-Japanese

The richness of the base hypothesis is one of the central notions in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). The idea is that there is no language-specific input, but all crosslinguistic variations are generated out of interactions of universal constraints ranked in a language-dependent manner. Although this hypothesis is thus closely tied to the architecture of the theoretical framework, I argue that it is not only a conceptual development but enjoys empirical endorsement. Root fusion (cf. Itô and Mester (1996) for the terminology) in Sino-Japanese has been studied extensively, but it still leaves unresolved issues in connection with underlying representation: (i) the underlying morphemic shape and (ii) the status of coronal (under)specification. Earlier analyses which assume a particular underlying form are problematic because these issues present indeterminism of underlying representation. Arguing that those approaches are unmotivated, I propose and defend an alternative analysis based on the richness of the base hypothesis. My analysis avoids empirical and conceptual problems encountered by earlier studies since there is no reliance on a certain input. This proposal is preferable also from the language learning point of view. The argument developed in this paper therefore lends empirical support for the richness of the base hypothesis.

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