~ ROA Version, 8/2002. Essentially identical to the Tech Report, with new pagination (but the same footnote and example numbering); correction of typos, oversights & outright errors; improved typography; and occasional small-scale clarificatory rewordings. Citation should include reference to this version.

T he distinction between marked and unmarked structures has played a role throughout this century in the development of phonology and of linguistics generally. Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) offers an approach to linguistic theory that aims to combine an empirically adequate theory of

It has been argued that rule-based phonological descriptions can uniformly be expressed as map-pings 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 con-straints 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.

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The proposition that the mental lexicon is a `dual route' system, advanced by Pinker and others to account for regular and irregular morphology, overlooks the important fact that morphological regularity correlates inversely with phonological regularity --`regular' past-tense beeped being phonologically irregular (exceptional syllable), while `irregular' past-tense kept is phonologically just regular. I argue that the correlation, which is general, can only be captured under a single-rather than `dual'- architecture, and an associational-rather than rule based- theory of morphology. Where morphological associations are strong, morphology looks regular and phonological alternations are inhibited, making phonology look irregular. In a system in which regularities are attributed to `rules', rules should be able to coexist with other rules, and morphological and phonological regularities should correlate directly, rather than inversely. 1.

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late 1950's. It's basic premises are that phonological structure reflects the linguistic competence of the individual native speaker to compute a phonetic representation for the potentially infinite number of sentences generated by the syntactic component of the grammar and that this competence can be investigated in a serious scientific fashion. The generative point of view has become dominant in the field of linguistics and has had varying degrees of influence on other cognitive sciences. This entry surveys the development of the generative approach over three fifteen-year segments and concludes with current research trajectories. 1. SPE: 1960- 1975 The early work of Chomsky and Halle both embraces and rejects various aspects of the two major schools of American Structural Linguistics inaugurated by Edward Sapir 1 (1884-1942) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). Sapir's "Item and Process " model posits an abstract Phonological Representation that is converted to a Phonetic Representation by processes that delete, add, and change sounds. Sapir stressed the

The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between vowel height and nasalization, a relationship that argues rather directly for the importance to phonological patterning of the perceptual distinctiveness of contrast. It thus adds to the list of cases making this point (see Flemming 1995, and also N Chiosin and Padgett 1997 for others), and strengthens the case for an output-oriented conception of contrast: in order for the perceptual distinctiveness of a contrast to be evaluated at the surface, contrast itself must be discernable by constraints at the surface

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respectively, "*(it) seemed the dog to bark", where each verb takes its own selected subject, and na:tural, with the same sound structure of na:ture, plus al. The question in each case is what causes the observed distortions which, as it turns out, are themselves regularities of the language ("raising", and "trisyllabic shortening", respectively). The answer in each case could in principle be either: (i) Representational constraints on the larger units (phrases or words) that prevent achievement of the strict compositionality; or: (ii) Transformational operations that take the result of strict compositionality as their input and produce the observed structures as their output. In the 60's, (ii) was uniformly taken to be the right answer, both in syntax and phonology. But at that time, the mere discovery of formally statable regularities was a considerable achievement in itself, and that success understandably obscured the important empirical issue of choosing between (i) and (ii) that