LING 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Obstruent, Phonological Rule, Optimality Theory
Document Summary
We can begin to look at two theories of phonology which differ fundamentally in the way they answer these questions. Sound patterns of english (the book that launched this enterprise) Broadly speaking, the difference between these theories are as follows: In spe, the rules - which describe transformations from underlying forms to surface forms - are the primary psychological objects (they are the things that are worthy of investigation). These rules apply in some order (like a flowchart start from a, move to b, then to c, etc. ). Additionally, there are statements on the well-formedness of abstract, lexical representations. The rules, their ordering, and these statements are language-specific. Language specific means that each language will have its own set of rules. In ot, there are only constraints on the well-formedness of surface representations and simple constraints which relate underlying forms to surface forms (we only ever see or hear surface forms, so we should concentrate on those).
