Optimality Theory and the Generative Complexity of Constraint Violability

It has been argued that rule-based phonological descriptions can uniformaly be expressed as mappings carried out by finite-state transducers, and therefore fall within the class of rational relations. If this property of generative capacity is an empirically correct characterization of phonological mappings, it should hold of any sufficiently restrictive theory of phonology, whether it utilizes constraints or rewrite rules. In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which the phonological descriptions that are possible within the view of constraint interaction embodied in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) remain within the class of rational relations. We show that this is true when GEN is itself a rational relation, and each of the constraints distinguishes among finitely many regular sets of candidates.

[1]  Bruce Tesar,et al.  Computational optimality theory , 1996 .

[2]  Alan S. Prince,et al.  Generalized alignment , 1993 .

[3]  Martin Kay,et al.  Regular Models of Phonological Rule Systems , 1994, CL.

[4]  James M. Scobbie,et al.  Attribute value phonology , 1991 .

[5]  CAROLE PARADIS,et al.  ON CONSTRAINTS AND REPAIR STRATEGIES , 1987 .

[6]  Jeffrey D. Ullman,et al.  Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation , 1979 .

[7]  C. Douglas Johnson,et al.  Formal Aspects of Phonological Description , 1972 .

[8]  Alan S. Prince,et al.  Faithfulness and reduplicative identity , 1995 .

[9]  Robert C. Berwick,et al.  Computational complexity and natural language , 1987 .

[10]  Bruce Wiebe,et al.  Modelling autosegmental phonology with multi-tape finite state transducers , 1992 .

[11]  Steven Bird,et al.  One-Level Phonology: Autosegmental Representations and Rules as Finite Automata , 1994, Comput. Linguistics.

[12]  Richard Sproat,et al.  Morphology and computation , 1992 .

[13]  R. J. Nelson,et al.  Introduction to Automata , 1968 .

[14]  Eitan M. Gurari,et al.  Introduction to the theory of computation , 1989 .

[15]  L. Karttunen.  Finite-state Constraints , 1993 .

[16]  T. Mark Ellison,et al.  Phonological Derivation in Optimality Theory , 1994, COLING.

[17]  Ewan Klein,et al.  Phonological Analysis in Typed Feature Systems , 1994, CL.

[18]  Kimmo Koskenniemi,et al.  A General Computational Model for Word-Form Recognition and Production , 1984 .