It is quite unequivocal that Kuhn was committed to (some version of) naturalism; that he defended, especially in his later work, the autonomy of scientific rationality; and that he rejected the ...correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the traditional realistic conception of the world’s mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that these three philosophical perspectives form an uneasy triangle, for while it is possible to coherently defend each of them separately or two of them combined, holding all three leads to incoherence. Hence, the only option is to reject one of them in a way that is both compatible with Kuhnian historiography and philosophically fruitful. My purpose in this paper is not exegetical. My ambition is to sketch a coherent philosophical framework which does justice to Kuhn’s historiographical model for scientific change and avoids the philosophical costs of relativism and anti-naturalism. In particular, I argue in favor of the following interconnected positions: (1) Given the role of anomalies in Kuhn’s historiographical model, the latter satisfies the two fundamental conditions for acknowledging the mind-independence of the world: the ‘irreducibility condition’ and the ‘objectivity condition’, (2) Kuhn’s rejection of the notion of an ‘Archimedean platform’ does not entail that the truth-value of beliefs doesn’t play a role in the explanation of their change, (3) Adopting scientific realism is the only way to defend the autonomy of scientific rationality within a naturalistic philosophical framework. However, adopting realism leads to a liberal rather than an eliminative version of naturalism.
Recitation of the Holy Qur’an has its own phonological features. This paper discusses the two types of partial nasal place assimilation known as ‘Ikhfaa’ and ‘Iqlaab’ in Arabic. Ikhfaa occurs in the ...environment where the nasal alveolar /n/ precedes fifteen oral obstruents, including /z/, /ẓ/, /s/, /ṣ/, /t/, /ṭ/, /d/, /ḍ/, /q/, /f/, /k/, /ʤ/, /ʃ/, /ð/ and /θ/. ‘Iqlaab’ occurs in the environment in which the nasal alveolar /n/ precedes the bilabial obstruent /b/. Since ‘Iqlaab’ also involves partial nasal place assimilation, it can be considered a type of Ikhfaa. This research aimed at identifying the constraints whose interactions cause different processes of partial nasal place assimilation in the recitation of the Holy Qur’an within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). The results indicate that ‘AGREE place’ is the key markedness constrain accounted for partial nasal place assimilation in ‘Ikhfaa’ and ‘Iqlaab’. In addition, *-long NObs is the markedness constrain responsible for nasals before an obstruent..
This paper examines acquisition of voiced obstruents by Yemeni Arabic speaking children. In particular, it looks at the phenomenon of devoicing voiced obstruents in word-final position, a ...well-established phenomenon in the literature of child phonology. Children appear to devoice the voiced obstruents as a strategy to simplify production of voiced obstruents in word-final position. Six Yemeni Arabic speaking children aged 2;6, 2;8, 2;9, 2;10,2;11 and 3 have participated in this study. They have been recorded and then the data collected have been transcribed by the researchers. An OT account is then provided to explain this phonological process. Results suggest that children substitute voiced obstruents in word-final position, most of the time, with their voiceless cognates in early child language. The devoicing process might have interesting implications, both phonological and pedagogical.
In the current study, we aimed at understanding the effect of exposure to complex input on speech sound development, by conducting a systematic meta-analysis review of the existing treatment-based ...studies employing complex input in children with speech sound disorders. In the meta-analysis review, using a list of inclusion criteria, we narrowed 280 studies down to 12 studies. Data from these studies were extracted to calculate effect sizes that were plotted as forest plots to determine the efficacy of complexity-based treatment approaches. The outcome variables of interest were improvement on the treated and generalization to the untreated sounds. Meta-analysis revealed that the exposure to complex input not only promoted improvement in production of complex speech sounds (
= 1.08, CI = 0.98-1.19) but also facilitated the production of untreated simple speech sounds (
= 2.69, CI = 1.98-3.54). Overall, the current findings revealed that the exposure to complex input promotes acquisition of both complex and simple speech sounds. The current findings are in line with the models of language learnability. The current findings have implications in the treatment of speech sound disorders.
ReVEL na Escola: Fonologia em Teoria da Otimidade Matzenauer, Carmen Lúcia Barreto; Azevedo, Roberta Quintanilha
Revista virtual de estudos da linguagem,
03/2017, Letnik:
15, Številka:
28
Journal Article
Os sons são o primeiro aspecto a chamar a atenção quando se ouve uma língua estrangeira ou quando se observam as manifestaçõe slinguísticas de uma criança pequena. E essa atenção recai não sobreos ...mecanismos físicos da produção dos sons, mas sobre as combinações entre eles, as quais são capazes de formar sílabas, morfemas, palavras, tornando-se veículo de significado. Essa organização dos sons é, em grande parte, específica de cada línguae é o que constitui a sua gramática, a suafonologia.
•Reviewed the phonology and alphabet of the Central Kurdish, a low-resourced language.•Proposed an adequate rule-based method for G2P conversion of the Central Kurdish.•Specified and ranked ...phonological constraints in the framework of Optimality Theory.•Showed that the current alphabet of Central Kurdish does not need additional letters.
The writing system of Central Kurdish features three cases in which there is no one-to-one mapping between the orthographical letters and the phonemes of the language. Consequently, the written words including these cases may be pronounced in multiple ways. The process of finding the correct pronunciation of written words is called Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) conversion and is a key step in natural language processing tasks such as speech synthesis. As Central Kurdish is a low-resourced language, we present a G2P conversion method based on the phonological rules of the language, rather than pronunciation dictionaries and data-driven learning methods. After reviewing the phonology and alphabet of the language through the framework of Optimality Theory, we generate all possible pronunciations. Then, by specifying and applying ranked constraints, we eliminate undesirable candidates so as to keep only one well-formed pronunciation per word. The evaluation of our proposed method on two datasets resulted in 0.75% of overall Phoneme Error Rate (PER) and achieved 94.71% precision in the detection of the short vowel /i/ and 100% of accuracy in the conversion of the letters “ی” and “و”. Analyzing these results suggests that there is no need for additional new letters in the current orthographic system of Central Kurdish. This approach also enables us to have a ranked suggestion list for the manual checking of the few unresolved ambiguous situations.
Abstract
This article shows that the universal generation problem for Optimality Theory (OT) is PSPACE-complete. While prior work has shown that universal generation is at least NP-hard and at most ...EXPSPACE-hard, our results place universal generation in between those two classes, assuming that NP ≠ PSPACE. We additionally show that when the number of constraints is bounded in advance, universal generation is at least NL-hard and at most NPNP-hard. Our proofs rely on a close connection between OT and the intersection non-emptiness problem for finite automata, which is PSPACE-complete in general and NL-complete when the number of automata is bounded. Our analysis shows that constraint interaction is the main contributor to the complexity of OT: The ability to factor transformations into simple, interacting constraints allows OT to furnish compact descriptions of intricate phonological phenomena.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
Hypocoristics have received considerable interest from phonologists in recent decades, particularly within the Optimality-theoretic literature. While most of these analyses have been ...situated in parallelist OT, I claim that this architectural choice entails hidden complexities. It is cross-linguistically common for multiple hypocoristics to be formed from a single proper noun, e.g.,
Matthew
→
Matt
/
Matty
. In this case, parallelist OT must resort to co-phonologies to avoid ranking paradoxes, which results in significant analytical complexity. By contrast, I argue in this paper that a stratal analysis is crucial for capturing multiple patterns of Hypocoristic Formation (HF) within a single architecture. I present here data of disyllabic hypocoristics from Standard Chilean Spanish. These hypocoristics are derived from the proper nouns by means of two separate anchoring sites: to the left edge of the full name, or to prominence in the full name, i.e., the tonic syllable. In addition, hypocoristics may be prosodically- or morphologically-driven: they may solely be formed by truncating the material of the proper noun, or, in the latter case, there may also be additional suffixal material provided. These data, therefore, lend themselves to a four-way categorisation. I show that this categorisation can be fully accounted for within a stratal architecture, and without the need for additional co-phonologies. Within the analysis, I locate each of the anchoring sites within the lexical phonology: edge-anchoring occurs at the stem level, along with syllabification and stress assignment, while prominence-anchoring occurs at the word level. In this way, the input to edge-anchoring at the stem level comprises a string of segments, while the input to prominence-anchoring at the word-level contains prosodic units up to the foot, which permits word-level HF to anchor to prominence. I further posit that prosodic- and morphologically-driven HF are caused through the passing of hypocoristic morphemes from the morpho-syntax to the phonology. Purely prosodic HF is triggered through a null or covert morpheme, while morphological HF triggered by an overt one. The hypocoristic morphemes themselves are stored as diacritics in the proper nouns’ lexical entries. Furthermore, the constraints that select the hypocoristic forms as optimal are sensitive to the presence of this hypocoristic morpheme, which is reflected in tableaux through indexing. When a hypocoristic morpheme is present in the input of a proper noun to a particular stratum, these highly-ranked indexed constraints select a corresponding hypocoristic form as optimal. If the hypocoristic morpheme is absent, these constraints do not assign violations, and the proper noun is instead (vacuously) found optimal. This analysis thus unifies two distinct patterns of HF in one phonological grammar through the inclusion of indexed-constraints and the serial derivation in a constraint-based architecture.
Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the phonological errors associated with consonant and vowel pronunciation made by Saudi learners of the English language in light of the ...optimality hypothesis. In addition, transfer and contrastive analysis hypotheses are discussed, which justify why Saudi English language learners make phonological errors. Methods. Thirty Saudi female students in their first semester in the English language department at Qassim University were randomly selected. They were examined on their pronunciation of over 30 words from a list of twenty sentences. Each participant was individually recorded using a sensitive microphone, and all recordings were transcribed using IPA symbols and compared to the English transcription to identify the correct and incorrect pronunciation. Each participant filled out a consent form before to having their pronunciation recorded. Results. The majority of errors committed by Saudi English learners are attributable to the substitution of foreign sounds with the closest native sounds. In addition, Saudi English learners tend to add a glottal stop to non-onset syllables and insert a vowel to break clusters of three or more obstruent consonants. This finding is due to the fact that their native language is an onset language and lacks clusters of three or more obstruent consonants. The descriptive tables in addition to the Pareto charts of these errors are provided. Conclusions. Overall, results from this study support optimality theory, transfer, and contrastive analysis hypotheses. Moreover, this study contributes to the growing literature on the investigation of phonological errors produced by Arab learners of English, particularly Saudi learners. This study proposes that Saudi English learners listen attentively to English native speakers to correct phonological errors. In addition, Saudi English learners should record their pronunciation during discussions and replay them in order to identify their mistakes and avoid them in the future.
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