Has anyone read Paul Boersma's "Sound Change in Functional Phonology" ?
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/soundChange.pdf
I've been trying to get a grasp of Optimality Theory, especially in order to apply Boersma's sound change algorithm in time for the completion of my undergraduate thesis (Constructing an early PIE descendant and exposing it to the North Caucasian substratum), but unfortunately, I don't have time.
Still, there are a few things I find puzzling, and likely because I'm not that well acquainted with OT. The main question I have is that it seems to me that mergers (of one phoneme with another unconditionally, or both into a third) should be extremely unlikely or forbidden entirely if language change tends to maximize contrast.
Secondly, the trend of rising sonority in Slavic seems to contradict both the minimization of effort (voiced consonants requiring the extra gesture of vocal vibrations) and the minimization of confusion (if voicing obscures place contrasts). Is it just a matter of the constraint rankings? What gives?
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/soundChange.pdf
I've been trying to get a grasp of Optimality Theory, especially in order to apply Boersma's sound change algorithm in time for the completion of my undergraduate thesis (Constructing an early PIE descendant and exposing it to the North Caucasian substratum), but unfortunately, I don't have time.
Still, there are a few things I find puzzling, and likely because I'm not that well acquainted with OT. The main question I have is that it seems to me that mergers (of one phoneme with another unconditionally, or both into a third) should be extremely unlikely or forbidden entirely if language change tends to maximize contrast.
Secondly, the trend of rising sonority in Slavic seems to contradict both the minimization of effort (voiced consonants requiring the extra gesture of vocal vibrations) and the minimization of confusion (if voicing obscures place contrasts). Is it just a matter of the constraint rankings? What gives?