| Description |
Markedness Suppression (MS) is a formal treatment of gradient variation in Optimality Theory that permits certain markedness constraints to have any number of violations ""suppressed,"" or ignored, by EVAL. This theory was designed for systems where the ""locus of variation"" is a single segment/feature whose variability has little impact on the well-formedness of the rest of the output (""local"" variation), as is the case for French schwa deletion. However, it is not immediately clear how MS can account for some other kinds of variation: in particular, ""coordinated"" variation, variation where the choice to suppress at one locus is conditioned by other suppression decisions, and variation at a single locus that is differently conditioned by ""interaction"" with neighboring phonological environments. These types of variation conflict, respectively, with the assumption of independence between loci and with the inability of suppressible constraints to reliably dominate the constraints ranked below them. This thesis analyzes two coordinated patterns - free variation between all-[p] and all-[b] in Warao and Shimakonde midvowel reduction, which varies in the extent of its application - and two interactive patterns - vowel backness harmony in Hungarian and English t/d-deletion. I will show that although suppressible constraints overgenerate on their own in the case of coordination, we can account for these patterns by introducing additional constraints that handle the additional structural requirements of variation. For the case of interaction, although MS does not permit the full range of possible analyses because of its weaker constraint dominance, I will show that it is possible to produce analyses of these patterns so long as all suppressible constraints refer to particular environments internally and a stringency relationship exists between them. In showing that analyses of these systems are possible, this thesis demonstrates that MS can account for these classes of variation and, thus, is not limited as a theory of solely local variation. |
