Author:
Jeroen van de Weijer Shanghai International Studies University

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Emergent Phonology seeks to minimize the role of Universal Grammar in linguistics by investigating how units such as distinctive features, segments, words, morphemes, and syllables, and other aspects of grammar, such as phonological, morphological or syntactic rules and conditions, emerge in the course of acquisition and language use, rather than as part of an innate language capacity. An obvious candidate for being acquired rather than being innate are the phonological constraints that take a central place in Optimality Theory. In this paper I discuss whether, and if so how, a constraint like *COMPLEX ‘No complex onsets’, which is assumed to be active in the acquisition of English and many other languages, could be acquired on the basis of the data to which the English language-learning child is exposed. If this constraint is acquired, it lessens the burden on any innate capacity, which is hypothesized to contain more general, cognitive strategies—perhaps not exclusive to linguistics.

  • Archangeli, Diana and Douglas Pulleyblank. 2015. Phonology without Universal Grammar. Frontiers of Psychology 6. 1229.

  • Archangeli, Diana and Douglas Pulleyblank. 2017. Phonology as an emergent system. In S. J. Hannahs and A. R. K. Bosch (eds.) The Routledge handbook of phonological theory. London: Routledge.

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  • Bates, Elizabeth, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi and Kim Plunkett. 1998. Innateness and emergentism. In W. Bechtel and G. Graham (eds.) A companion to cognitive science. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell. 590601.

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  • Beckman, Mary E. and Jan Edwards. 2000. The ontogeny of phonological categories and the primacy of lexical learning in linguistic development. Child Development 71. 240249.

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  • Boersma, Paul and Bruce Hayes. 2001. Empirical tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm. Linguistic Inquiry 32. 4586.

  • Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and language use (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 94). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Bybee, Joan L. 2010. Language, usage, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Croft, William and David Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Culicover, Peter W. 2016. Foreword. In M. H. Christiansen and N. Chater (eds.) Creating language –Integrating evolution, acquisition, and processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  • vii–x. Dawson, Colin and LouAnn Gerken. 2011. When global structure “explains away” local grammar: A Bayesian account of rule-induction in tone sequences. Cognition 120. 350359.

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  • Dekkers, Joost Frank R. H. van der Leeuw and Jeroen van de Weijer 2000. Optimality theory: Phonology, syntax, and acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  • Ellison, T. Mark. 2000. The universal constraint set: Convention, not fact. In Dekkers et al. (2000, 524–553).

  • Everett, Daniel L. 2016. An evaluation of Universal Grammar and the phonological mind. Frontiers in Psychology 7. 15.

  • Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. 2004. Markedness and faithfulness constraints in child phonology. In Kager et al. (2004, 73–108).

  • Goldwater, Sharon and Mark Johnson. 2003. Learning ot constraint rankings using a maximum entropy model. Paper presented at Proceedings of the Stockholm workshop on variation within Optimality Theory.

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  • Hale, Mark and Charles Reiss. 2008. The phonological enterprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Jackendoff, Ray. 2007. A whole lot of challenges for linguistics. Journal of English Linguistics 35. 253262.

  • Johnson, Wyn and Paula Reimers. 2010. Patterns in child phonology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  • Kager, René. 1999. Optimality theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Kager, René, Joe Pater and Wim Zonneveld (eds.). 2004. Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Levelt, Clara and Ruben van de Vijver. 2004. Syllable types in cross-linguistic and developmental grammars. In Kager et al. (2004, 204–218).

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  • MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (Third edition). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

  • McCarthy, John and Alan Prince. 1995. Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In J. Beckman, L. W. Dickey and S. Urbanczyk (eds.) Papers in Optimailty Theory (University of Massachussetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18). Amherst MA: Graduate Linguistic Student Association. 249384.

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  • McCarthy, John J. 2002. A thematic guide to Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Mielke, Jeff. 2008. The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Technical Report TR-2, Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. and Technical Report CU-CS-697-93, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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  • Saffran, Jenny R. 2001. Words in a sea of sounds: The output of statistical learning. Cognition 81. 14969.

  • Smith, Neil V. 1973. The acquisition of phonology: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Tesar, Bruce and Paul Smolensky. 2000. Learnability in Optimality Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Tzakosta, Marina. 2004. Multiple parallel grammars in the acquisition of stress in Greek L1. Doctoral dissertation. Leiden University.

  • Weijer, Jeroen van de. 2009. Optimality Theory and Exemplar Theory. Phonological Studies 12. 117124.

  • Weijer, Jeroen van de. 2012. Grammar as selection: Combining Optimality Theory and Exemplar Theory. Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan.

  • Weijer, Jeroen van de. 2014. The origin of OT constraints. Lingua 142. 6675.

  • Weijer, Jeroen van de. 2017. Where now with Optimality Theory? In Q. Ma (ed.) Frontier research in phonetics and phonology. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

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  • Weijer van de , Jeroen. 2013. Learning markedness constraints: The case of French. In S. Aalberse and A. Auer (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands 2013. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 188200.

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  • Weijer, Jeroen van de and Marina Tzakosta. 2017. The status of *Complex in Greek. In T. Georgakopoulos (ed.) Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Greek Linguistics. Berlin: ICGL.

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  • Wexler, Kenneth. 1990. Innateness and maturation in linguistic development. Developmental Psychobiology 23. 645660.

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Editors

Editor-in-Chief: András Cser

Editor: György Rákosi

Review Editor: Tamás Halm

Editorial Board

  • Anne Abeillé / Université Paris Diderot
  • Željko Bošković / University of Connecticut
  • Marcel den Dikken / Eötvös Loránd University; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Hans-Martin Gärtner / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Elly van Gelderen / Arizona State University
  • Anders Holmberg / Newcastle University
  • Katarzyna Jaszczolt / University of Cambridge
  • Dániel Z. Kádár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • István Kenesei / University of Szeged; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Anikó Lipták / Leiden University
  • Katalin Mády / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gereon Müller / Leipzig University
  • Csaba Pléh / Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Central European University
  • Giampaolo Salvi / Eötvös Loránd University
  • Irina Sekerina / College of Staten Island CUNY
  • Péter Siptár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gregory Stump / University of Kentucky
  • Peter Svenonius / University of Tromsø
  • Anne Tamm / Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church
  • Akira Watanabe / University of Tokyo
  • Jeroen van de Weijer / Shenzhen University

 

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Acta Linguistica Academica
Language English
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ISSN 2559-8201 (Print)
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