So let’s talk about constraints.
All of us have rules that we live by, from
simple codes to always seek freedom, to complicated
orders that bind and drive our actions.
Those constraints don’t just apply to our
ethics: we can find rules going
way down into how we shape our sounds and
words.
And when it comes down to the gears of phonology,
our differences stem from what guidelines
we don’t feel too guilty about breaking.
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling
Space.
When you look across all the languages of
the world, the amount of variation in the
sounds humans use, or in the combinations
we come up with to build words, can almost
make you dizzy.
You can find languages like Rotokas that only
have 12 basic sounds, or phonemes, in their phonology.
And you can find languages like Taa with over
ten times that number.
There are languages that only let you have
the simplest of syllables, just a consonant
followed by a vowel, like Mba, or there are
languages like English that let you have words
like strength, where you can pile a heap of
consonants before and after the vowel.
All those differences in what one language
versus another lets you do with sounds may
be enough to make you want to stick a paper
bag over your head and forget about trying to work
out what’s happening underneath.
There’s a real tension between all the variation
we hear and the idea that we’re all working
from the same cognitive playbook.
But when you start digging around, you find
that there are deeper commonalities across
the different sound systems.
And those are things that we want our phonological
theory to explain.
Today, we’ll be looking at one particular theory
that takes up this fight: Optimality Theory, or OT.
In OT, all languages draw on the same basic set
of constraints on what you can do with your phonology.
And all languages can feed just about any candidate
string of sounds into their phonological machines.
So the constraints are the same, and the inputs
are potentially the same, but we end up with
vastly different outputs.
Where does all the variation come from?
According to OT, it’s all in how important
each language finds each of the rules in relation
to each other.
Just like different people view different
rules as more or less vital, languages do, too.
Like, your attitude towards stealing will
be different if you’re a pirate or a holy knight.
So you may have to slash up some rule or another
in order to make a set of sounds fit the constraints
of your language, but as long as you don’t
break any of the important ones, then you’re okay.
You end up with the optimal solution for your
languages.
To get to those solutions, you need to rank
your different constraints against each other.
But before we can do that, like, we’ve got
to ask: what are these constraints, even?
There are two basic types, and the first of
them tracks with those commonalities between
languages we brought up before.
These are known as markedness constraints,
and they tell you to do the most common thing
cross-linguistically.
The most common traits get called unmarked,
and the less-common, typologically rarer outcomes
get called marked.
So for example, let’s go back and look at
how we build syllables.
You may remember from our episode about syllable
structure that the beginning and ending consonants
of syllables work differently.
Depending on the language, the beginning ones,
known as onsets, can either be required, or
they can be optional.
So in Mba or Hawaiian, you always need an
onset.
But in other languages, like Korean or English,
you don’t have to have them – you can,
like in the word May, but you don’t have
to, like in Eddie.
But there are no languages that ban you from
putting consonants at the beginning of syllables.
It’s always allowed, at the least.
And OT captures that with the markedness constraint
Onset.
This is just a rule that says that syllables
should always have onsets, and depending on
how that rule gets ranked compared to the others,
that’ll affect how your language turns out.
But let’s get back to that in a bit, and
focus on syllables some more first.
So, unlike consonants in onsets, languages
are way iffier about putting consonants at the
end of syllables, in the coda.
Some languages take a hard line, and just
ban all consonants from popping in to finish
a syllable, like in Fijian or Yareba.
Other languages do allow them, but in restricted
ways, like Japanese or Mandarin, where only
a subset of all the consonants in the language
can make it into the coda.
Like, [n] could make it in, but not [b].
And still other languages, like German or,
yes, English, let you put almost any sound
down in the coda.
But no language requires you to have a coda;
it’s always optional.
So it’s the opposite pattern from onsets:
Onsets can be required or optional; codas
can be optional or banned.
For OT, this pattern is codified in the constraint
NoCoda, which…
actually, you can guess that one, probably.
Now remember, under the OT view, every single
human has both of these constraints.
The difference between languages on how they
treat syllables is just driven by how
much weight they put behind each rule.
In a decent number of languages, Onset and
NoCoda rank really high, above all other relevant
constraints, and so they just end up with
simple consonant-vowel syllables, tossing
CVs all over the place like they’re applying
for jobs.
In the World Atlas of Language Structures,
there are 61 such languages, which makes up
12.5% of their analyzed sample.
But obviously, that means the vast majority
of languages break one or the other of those
rules, if not both.
How do we know that everyone still has a complete
set of those constraints?
Like, if you’re an English speaker, it doesn’t
look like Onset or NoCoda apply at all.
But if we look carefully, we can still find situations
where low-ranking constraints can win out.
Take a word like “Johnny”.
For that middle [n], you have a choice: do
you put it at the end of the first syllable,
like [dʒɑn.i:], or do you put it at the
beginning of the second, like [dʒɑ.ni:]?
If you don’t have Onset or NoCoda left at
all in English, either should be fine.
And yet, what English actually produces is
the second one, [dʒɑ.ni:].
Words like this show us what’s called the
Emergence of the Unmarked: they serve as a
testament to the stealth operation of otherwise
violable markedness constraints.
But… what other kinds of constraints are
there?
After all, we have to be ranking something
above constraints like Onset and NoCoda, if
we’re going to keep them from enforcing
the same syllable shape for every language everywhere.
And so in opposition to markedness, we have
Faithfulness constraints.
The family of Faithfulness rules says that
whatever input you put through your phonological
cruncher should come out looking the same
on the other side.
Like, you have constraints like Max, which
says that you shouldn’t delete any sounds
from your input; Dep, which declares that
you shouldn’t just stick any extra sounds
into a word, and Ident, which states that
all the items in the output should be exactly
the same as those in the input.
These, plus more faithfulness constraints
like them, don’t care whether the pattern
in the input has codas or unusual consonants
or two vowels or three consonants in a row.
Those things are the concerns of markedness
constraints.
Faithfulness constraints just want everything
to sound exactly the same on both sides.
So let’s put these two together for a simple
test.
Let’s say your input string is something
like “Venom”.
How would we deal with Venom in Japanese?
First, we need to do some setup.
In OT, we show our considerations in a little
tableau.
We put our input, “venom”, up here, and
then we list our possible candidates down
this column here.
That [m] at the end could be a problem, since
it’s a coda, and we know that codas aren’t
great across languages.
But we could potentially just be super faithful
and leave everything as it is.
We could delete the [m] completely and get
[veno].
We could change the [m] to a [n], which would
be less marked at the end of a syllable.
Or we could stick in a vowel like [ɯ], and
then that [m] wouldn’t be a coda anymore.
It’d be the onset of a new syllable instead.
So those are our four candidates under consideration.
Along the top, we list our relevant constraints
for what we’re doing, and here, that’s
NoCoda, Max, Ident, and Dep.
If you look closely, you’ll see each of
our candidates violates one of these constraints.
We mark each of those violations with a little
star in the appropriate box.
Just keeping “venom” the same would be
a violation of NoCoda.
Deleting the [m] outright makes you violate
Max, which says you shouldn’t delete things,
and changing it to “venon” is a problem
for Ident, because [m] and [n] aren’t the
same sound.
Finally, adding the vowel at the end breaks
Dep, since you stuck an extra sound in.
Now, if we look at how Japanese actually works,
we can see that the one that wins out is [venomɯ].
So what that means is that for Japanese, all
the other constraints outrank Dep, because
that’s the one that ends up getting violated.
All of the other ones encounter fatal errors
by hitting their relevant constraint, and
so we mark each of those with a little exclamation
point.
And that tells us how “venom” works.
By looking across lots of different words
in Japanese, we can work out how the ranking
of constraints works for the whole language.
And different languages have different rankings:
check the English one out here.
In English, generally speaking, faithfulness
constraints rank pretty high: we don’t really
like changing things that much.
Even though keeping “venom” as just “venom”
violates NoCoda, it turns out English doesn’t
really care that much about it; sticking with
Ident and just keeping everything the same
is the best.
And this is just one small example!
Some phonologists use OT to try to explain
everything from stress patterns to how and
where to add affixes.
Even some syntacticians have tried using OT
to explain similar sorts of cross-linguistic
patterns in their own field.
It’s a very powerful tool, so when it comes
to how to apply Optimality Theory, it’s
important not to constrain your imagination.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space
for this week.
If you found the optimal solution, you learned
that there are patterns to what sounds languages
use and how they put them together; that Optimality
Theory tries to explain these commonalities
by proposing a universal set of constraints;
and that depending on how a language ranks
those constraints, they end up with different
phonological patterns.
The Ling Space is made by all these amazing
people over here.
If you want to learn more about how kids learn
what rankings their language uses, check back
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See you next time! Aruriiawagáac!
