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This dissertation examines the "free" word order or scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory. To overcome the problems raised in single-component analyses in explaining word order variation, I propose an `interface' approach in which the constraints from several different components of grammar participate, compete, and interact with one another. That is, various word orders are considered to be motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles of these languages. As the constraints from different modules of grammar are highly conflicting, I utilize Optimality Theory to demonstrate how the constraints interact and resolve conflicts among one another. In this approach, each scrambled variant, i.e. a sentence with a particular word order, is conceived of as the "optimal" output, which instantiates the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-contextual information given in the input....

Phonotactic statements characterize contextual restrictions on the occurrence of segments or feature values. This study argues that consonantal phonotactics are best understood as syllable-independent, string-based conditions reflecting positional differences in the perceptibility of contrasts. The analyses proposed here have better empirical coverage compared to syllable-based analyses that link a consonant's feature realization to its syllabic position. Syllable-based analyses require identification of word-medial syllabic divisions; the account proposed here does not and this may be a significant advantage. Word-medial syllableedges are, under specific conditions, not uniformly identified by speakers; but comparable variability does not exist for phonotactic knowledge. The paper suggests that syllableindependent conditions define segmental phonotactics, and that word-edge phonotactics, in turn, are among the guidelines used by speakers to infer word-internal syllable divisions.

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When listeners first experience speech that is either spoken very rapidly or has been artificially compressed, there is usually a short period of time during which they find it difficult to understand the speaker. However, with experience, they improve. This improvement reflects adjustments that may be occurring at a number of different levels of speech processing. The purpose of the current study was to further investigate the nature of the adjustments that occur when listeners are asked to recognize highly compressed speech. The first experiment examined adjustment to compressed speech as a function of the amount of exposure, using two different speakers and two different compression rates. The results of this experiment confirm that adjustment to highly compressed speech occurs over a number of sentences. Moreover, the gradient of adjustment depends on the compression rate. Lower compression rates required less experience before full adjustment was obtained. A second and third exper...

Alternations that are partly phonologically, partly morphologically conditioned are a central problem in phonological theory. In Optimality Theory, two types of solutions have been proposed: morphologically specialized phonological constraints (interface constraints) and different constraint rankings for different morphological categories (cophonologies). This paper presents empirical evidence that distinguishes between these two hypotheses. Stem-final vowel alternations in Finnish are governed by a mixed set of conditions that range from purely phonological to morphological and lexical, from iron-clad exceptionless regularities to quantitative tendencies. Using a standard dictionary as the data base, we show that phonological conditioning plays the dominant role, but in cases where phonology underdetermines the output, morphological conditioning may emerge. We then show that partial ordering of constraints, commonly used to model variation, extends to morphological condi...

this paper. Special thanks go to Jennifer Hay for critical discussion and constructive comments

This paper explores onset-sensitive stress from a typological, phonetic and phonological perspective. A phonetic study of three onset-sensitive stress systems suggests a close match between onset weight distinctions and a phonetic measure of perceptual energy, such that phonological weight criteria are the phonetically most effective ones. Perceptual considerations also offer an explanation for other typological observations, including the relative rarity of onset-sensitive stress, the greater weight of low sonority onsets, and the subordination of onset-sensitive weight distinctions to rimal based ones in languages with both types of weight distinctions. Onset-based weight criteria are effectively modelled using a skeletal slot model of the syllable referenced by a family of prominence constraints requiring that heavy syllables be stressed and that light syllables be unstressed. 1.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very pleased to have had the encouragement and support of a committee of three linguists for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration: Mark Liberman, William Labov and Eugene Buckley. Each of them made my transition back to Penn pleasant after what seemed like a long absence. It was a great pleasure to have Mark Randolph both as an external reader and as a colleague at Motorola. Mark’s work at MIT a decade ago has served as an inspiration to me. Orhan Karaali made this dissertation possible in this millennium. As my manager for over two years at Motorola, Orhan insisted on making my dissertation a priority at work. Harry Bliss provided his voice to this project and our whole group is very grateful for his patience and cooperation. My colleagues at Motorola listened to my ideas and provided technical and theoretical assistance at every turn: Noel

Most pronunciation lexica for speech synthesis in English take no account of morphology. Here we demonstrate the benefits of including a morphological breakdown in the transcription.