Create tongue-root grammar...

A command in the Constraint grammars submenu of the New menu, for creating an OTGrammar object with a tongue-root-harmony grammar.

These OTGrammar grammars only accept inputs of the form V1tV2, where V1 and V2 are chosen from the six front vowels i, ɪ, e, ɛ, ə, and a.

The following phonological features are relevant:

      ATR RTR
high i ɪ
mid e ɛ
low ə a

Constraints

The resulting OTGrammar will usually contain at least the following five constraints:

*[rtr / hi]
“do not implement [retracted tongue root] if the vowel is high.”
*[atr / lo]
“do not implement [advanced tongue root] if the vowel is low.”
PARSE (rtr)
“make an underlying [retracted tongue root] specification surface.”
PARSE (atr)
“make an underlying [advanced tongue root] specification surface.”
*GESTURE (contour)
“do not go from advanced to retracted tongue root, nor the other way around, within a word.”

This set of constraints thus comprises:

• two grounding conditions (Archangeli & Pulleyblank (1994)), which we can see as gestural constraints;
• two faithfulness constraints, which favour the similarity between input and output, and can be seen as implementing the principle of maximization of perceptual contrast;
• a harmony constraint, which, if crucially ranked higher than at least one faithfulness constraint, forces tongue-root harmony.

In addition, there may be the following four constraints:

*[rtr / mid]
“do not implement [retracted tongue root] if the vowel is mid”; universally ranked lower than *[rtr / hi].
*[rtr / lo]
“do not implement [retracted tongue root] if the vowel is low”; universally ranked lower than *[rtr / mid].
*[atr / mid]
“do not implement [advanced tongue root] if the vowel is mid”; universally ranked lower than *[atr / lo].
*[atr / hi]
“do not implement [advanced tongue root] if the vowel is high”; universally ranked lower than *[atr / mid].

The universal rankings referred to are due to the local-ranking principle (Boersma (1998)). A learning algorithm may enforce this principle, e.g., if *[rtr / hi] falls down the ranking scale, *[rtr / mid] may be pushed along.

For information on learning these tongue-root grammars, see OT learning and Boersma (2000).

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© Paul Boersma 2014,2023