Change, Chance, and Optimality

by McMahon, April

• ISBN13: 9780198241256
• ISBN10: 0198241259
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-11-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book is about how languages change. It is also a devastating critique of a widespread linguistic orthodoxy. April McMahon argues that to provide a convincing explanation of linguistic change the roles of history and contingency must be accommodated in linguistic theory. She also showsthat theoretical work in related disciplines can be used to assess the value of such theories. Optimality Theory, or OT as it is usually called, dominates contemporary phonology, especially in the USA, and is becoming increasingly influential in syntax and language acquisition. Having set out its basis principles, Professor McMahon assesses their explanatory power in analysing languagechange and its residues in current phonological systems. Using cross-linguistic data, and drawing comparisons with other theories inside and outside linguistics, she shows that OT is incapable of accounting for language change, without the addition of rules and an appreciation of chance andhistorical contingency that would then undermine its theoretical underpinnings. OT relies on innateness and needs to discuss the origins of allegedly genetically-specified features. The author considers the nature and evolution of the human language capacity, and demonstrates a profound mismatch between the predictions of evolutionary biology and the claims for innateness madein OT.

Author Biography

Dr April McMahon has been Lecturer in Historical Linguistics and Phonology at the University of Cambridge since 1988. From March 2000 she will be Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Understanding Language Change (CUP, 1994) and Lexical Phonology and the History of English (CUP, forthcoming 2000), and has published articles and reviews in many journals. She has long-standing research interests in the relationship of phonological theory and sound change, and in interdisciplinary issues including connections between evolutionary theory, genetics and historical linguistics.

Table of Contents

Optimality Theory: the Basics	1	(12)
Past	1	(4)
Present	5	(4)
Future?	9	(4)
Optimality in a complex World: Additions and Extensions	13	(44)
The whole story?	13	(1)
Inviolable constraints and principles of constraint interaction	14	(5)
System-specific strategies	19	(14)
Language-specific constraints	19	(5)
The reintroduction of rules	24	(9)
Correspondence Theory	33	(8)
Morphology--phonology interactions	41	(6)
Sympathy	47	(5)
Optimality and acquisition	52	(5)
Constraints, Causation, and Change	57	(72)
History matters	57	(1)
The Cutting Edge: between synchrony and diachrony	58	(32)
Epenthesis and deletion	58	(17)
Metathesis	75	(10)
Chain shifts	85	(5)
Constraint reranking and the explanation of change	90	(15)
Modelling sound change in OT	90	(2)
The Great Vowel Shift: Miglio (1998)	92	(6)
Historical segment loss	98	(7)
OT and variation	105	(10)
Plus ca change: formal models and language change	115	(14)
The bigger picture	115	(1)
Some formal approaches to syntactic change	116	(5)
General problems	121	(4)
Optimality Theory	125	(4)
Cognates and Comparisons: Natural Morphology and Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Biology	129	(24)
A problem shared	129	(1)
Natural Morphology	130	(7)
Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology	137	(16)
The Emergence of the Innate: Evolving Optimality	153	(24)
The nature of innateness	153	(3)
Language, complexity, and design	156	(14)
Central questions	156	(1)
Gradualism and the evolution of language	157	(5)
Selective advantage and the evolution of language	162	(8)
Evolving Optimality	170	(7)
Optimality and Optimism: the Panglossian Paradigm	177	(8)
References	185	(10)
Index	195