What Constraints Are There on Linguistic Sounds? Optimality Theory

How can we try to capture the commonalities and differences between linguistic sound systems? What makes one language sound different from another? In this week's episode, we take a look at Optimality Theory: how we can use constraints to describe how phonology behaves, how we rank which rules we care most about breaking, and how changing our priorities leads to totally different sound outcomes.
This is Topic #82!
This week's tag language: Hidatsa!
Related videos:
Rhymes and Reasons: The Shapes of Syllables - • Syllable Structure
Last episode:
Words from Another World: The Linguistics of Alien Languages - • What Could Alien Langu...
Other of our phonology and phonetics videos:
The Melody of Feet: Stress Patterns in Phonology - • How Do We Stress Our W...
Phonation States: How We Vibrate to Make Sounds - • Where Does Your Voice ...
Nosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorants - • What Do Nasal Sounds L...
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to rank their constraints, at: www.thelingspace.com/episode-82/
(This link should be operating by Thursday evening.)
Find us on all the social media worlds:
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of this week's episode is based on information from Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs's book, Understanding Phonology.
There's a great archive of papers (albeit scholarly) on Optimality Theory at the Rutgers Optimality Archive: roa.rutgers.edu/
Angus Grieve-Smith also has a good short introduction to OT here: www.scribd.com/document/25583...
The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online is a great resource for learning more about linguistic typology! Our specific source on syllable structure is wals.info/chapter/12 , but it's a good place to poke around and learn things.
Looking forward to next time!

[@adammullan5904]

Tossing CVs all over the place like they're applying for jobs" THIS is the type of humour I am HERE for!

[@thelingspace]

Entirely the sort of joke that makes me chuckle when I'm writing. ^_^

[@mouseinsneakers]

One of the best channels on KZbin, thanks for helping me survive my phonology class!

[@thelingspace]

Very glad to be able to help! ^_^

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

This channel is so nerdy and I love it

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! Glad you like it. We are pretty unapologetic about it. ^_^

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

The Ling Space and I'm all the happier for it xD

[@natasha6867]

I have always wanted a channel like this! Language evolution is so fascinating but it's way out of my field so I need someone to explain it to me layman style. Thank you for your videos! I think your videos would be even better if you had more imagery or some colbert report-style area on the side. It would help me keep up with all the knowledge you're dropping!

[@ilyastein7527]

I want that "I love phonetics" thing so bad

[@thelingspace]

You are in luck, it is still on sale over at Cascadilla! That's where I got it. www.cafepress.com/cascadilla/5005580

[@nigeliscool657]

I've been waiting so long for the next episode!

[@Theternitend]

OT really shines when it comes to describing stress systems as well. That's probably my favorite application of the framework ^^ Great video, as always!

[@thevoidreturnsnull62]

I just discovered your channel last night while looking for a video on predicate logic. I'm amazed you're not more popular than you are! This is an absolutely criminal amount of views for the wealth of informative and well-delivered content you have.

[@justinward3679]

Was thinking about optimality theory this morning, thanks.

[@lizschell9022]

i love this channel and your humor! thanks for making this topic fun and interesting .

[@charron115]

I love this channel! Thank you!

[@tehreemsajjad5617]

Thankyou it was very helpful indeed!

[@Selgomez992]

Thank you for the clear explanation!

[@m.shafeek5926]

Thank you very much for this wonderful work.

[@Elkissia]

Thank you for you efforts 🙏

[@benedictaadeleha4004]

Awesome explanation

[@hamedal-tairi1836]

I like the way you explain things. Could you please make another video about the emergent phonology? Thank you very much:)

[@lucybae8501]

Thank you for the great explanation! It really helped me prepare for the phonology exam :)

[@nohisocitutampoc2789]

Excellent introduction.

[@AmirBeysafer]

This OT is always a riddle for me!

[@daltonyellowwolf6752]

Omg, the ending tho! Thats cool to hear hidatsa on youtube makes me happy.

[@thelingspace]

It makes me really happy to hear it made you happy!

[@Anradin26]

I finish my final year of my English Language degree in two days and I FIND THIS CHANNEL NOW??? Where were you when i was panicking over markedness and faithfulness in first year??? lmao

[@chalo2136]

Thank you!!!! My partner and I get it now! Come teach our class! haha

[@hanklaw6062]

Hey Moti, just curious about two points that you have presented as phonotactic universals: 1) At around 3:30: "there are no languages that ban you from putting consonants in the beginning of syllables" 2) Around 4:20: "no language requires you to have a coda; it's always optional" Are these only meant to be constraints on the surface-level, *phonetic* realization of a given word, independent of the phonemes it contains? I was doing some reading on Aboriginal Australian languages a while back and I recall Breen & Pensalfini (1999) and Tabain, Breen, & Butcher (2004) claiming that the Arandic languages of central Australia (most prominently the Arrernte group) do *not* allow onset consonants or empty codas at the phonemic level, and are underlyingly VC(C) in their syllabic structure. However, syllables are commonly realized on the surface-level as CV or CVC through conditioned deletion/epenthesis (as an example, the relevant allophony of Upper Arrenrte is presented here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Arrernte_language#Phonotactics) and so I was wondering if such languages still conform to the constraints above. Thanks, love the channel!

[@keegster7167]

that's very cool!

[@lictinbernal3092]

¡Qué video tan útil! Me encanto.

[@laripolimata]

your lecture of 10 minutes beats my professor's attempt to explain OT in two classes

[@ye-jeejung6489]

You helped me a lot :) :) :) Thank you so much! Still, Phonology is killing me :(

[@davidkeller8519]

4:57 this joke made me smile on a day I previously spent freaking out over phonology!

[@jackiearmijos8366]

After watching your video, I may say that you are an expert in linguistic field. Congratulations from the bottom of my heart. Addtionally, I wonder if I could ask you something related to phonological theories. Would you mind?

[@kpaukeaho6180]

Hawaiian doesn't require an onset consonant for syllable construction. "Ua uē au i ia ua" is a perfectly valid sentence.

[@zioscozio]

I was thinking the same for Italian: the word "aiuola" breaks into syllables as "a-iu-o-la".

[@sugarfrosted2005]

Mark Stoleson I suspect you're forgetting about glottal stops.

[@kpaukeaho6180]

sugarfrosted - Well actually there are no glottal stops in the above sentence. You're correct, the ʻokina (glottal stop) is a consonant in Hawaiian, but my point above is that consonants aren't required to form a Hawaiian syllable. Believe me, as speaker of Hawaiian myself, I value ʻokina greatly :)

[@kpaukeaho6180]

sugarfrosted - words with or without ʻokina are entirely different. For example, au is the personal pronoun, while ʻau is the word for swim. Iʻa is a fish, ia is a word marking a previously mentioned thing, ʻia is a marker that turns an active verb into a passive.

[@kpaukeaho6180]

The above sentence means "I cried because of that (aforementioned) rain."

[@evanpickett3500]

I think this just explained a difference that I've noticed between American and Australian English. Americans seem to pronounce Antarctica as ant-arctica, compared to my pronunciation as an-tarctica. I've also noticed it with Martin (Mart-in vs Mar-tin). Is there a known difference between the priorities of English accents?

[@JayFolipurba]

I'll need this later, maybe.

[@swim3936]

Hey, could you do a video on OT approaches to syntax?

[@BigSirZebras]

Thanks

[@fractalcat3696]

"Tossing CVs all over the place like they're applying for jobs" 😂 that got me

[@easonrytter1205]

Hiya! Is there any ranking of the the contraindications for which just a vowel (V) wins out (as opposed to CV, CVC, VC)

[@angelamilivojevic9061]

I feel like there seriously needs to be a video on substance-free phonology on this channel to even the playing field, coming from someone who firmly believes in SFP! OT is not by any means the only way to do phonology.

[@treya111]

Could you guys talk about segments and suprasegments sometime? Thxxx

[@mintcarouselchannelabandon5109]

aahhh ok so i know this video is old but im in a phonology class entirely using OT and the section on metrical phonology was actually bonkers. anyway phonology is my jam pls do more episodes on it thaaank

[@azkawaheed5660]

Can anyone tell me which theory will be used for those who misarticulate the sounds ??? For example those who lisper??I want it for my assignment

[@verdakorako4599]

English also follows ident in writing especially when the word is from French (colonel) unless the word had/has a diacritic (Über) English doesn't like diacritics.

[@mariahanif7830]

Hi. What's an onset in simple word? Please give example

[@s20051213]

I don't quite understand what the "!" means in the tableau...

[@12tone]

Just to make sure I understand, this is specifically for borrowed words, right? Like, this would apply to the English phrase "deja vu", because it's stolen from French, but wouldn't apply to, say, "internet", which we made ourselves? Or am I missing something?

[@v4nadium]

12tone well inter comes from latin and net is "borrowed" from midddle and old english all the way to old norse, proto indo european, etc. In a similar way it would 've been borrowed from a foreign language.

[@12tone]

Huh, true. Yeah, if you fit in root words there's not really much unique to English at all, is there? So I guess this is more broadly applicable than I gave it credit for. Thanks!

[@rrnlg2279]

12tone No it isn't. All languages have different sounds and different rules for putting those sounds together. This describes the rules for how those sound systems can change over time.

[@unLargoEtcetera]

This could also apply for invented words. For example, a Spanish native speaker as myself knows that "trastadón" is a possible word while "strastadon" isn't, even if neither of them actually exists. This is because Spanish doesn't allow onsets like "str-".

[@prezentoappr1171]

@@unLargoEtcetera ah the phonotactics constraints

[@matthewgriffin245]

Pretty sure Eddie starts with some type of glottal constriction in its onset; most English vowels word-initially tend to.

[@ananawaw]

In reference to the "input"; what constitutes input? how would we know what the input is for a word within its own native language? or rather, does this theory only apply when it comes to borrowing foreign words?

[@felipevasconcelos6736]

No word is completely native, some come from the pronto-language, some are borrowed, but people rarely just make words out of nothing. But when they do, the input is the same as the output, since they wouldn't make a word that doesn't follow their own constrains.

[@mintcarouselchannelabandon5109]

he didnt go into this, but "Richness of the Base" pretty much means all possible inputs are technically allowed. That means underlying /kait/ could have an input [kaitolumaso], which would satisfy nocoda, but at the cost of violating dep 7 times. or even [xais] could be a viable candidate- we just made the stops undergo lenition into fricatives. but that would violate ident. so to answer your question in the simplest terms, what constitutes an input is literally anything and everything. if it is literally a string of random segments, consonants and vowels, its an input. we just use common sense to pare it down to 4-8 candidates we actually look at in the tableaux.

[@Evanna11LilyLuna]

OT is such a neat thing :). Personally I really liked reading some pragmatics OT articles (had to read them for pragmatics course).

[@espositogregory]

Anyone else slightly feel like a prevert hearing Doppelgänger Lieberman say “violated”? In all seriousness though, the short&tight angled “business” facial style suits you him; even at the cost of his evil nature. An evil so subtle yet complete, that only those antithetical virtues of benevolent nobility attributed to this dimension’s Lieberman match in range & magnitudes... Wherever he is... Anyhoo, It’d be swell if Bizarro Lieberman could do more videos, or possibly a whole playlist on writing systems! I am doing work in this area and so much potential has never been so unedamined as that of experimental Linguistics. Modeling the written word to engage the imagination and contextualize thoughts. change minds and cultures wash civilization anew as tides do unto a beach. Language shapes us just as we shape it, yet if so, what does our palaver tell of us? Perhaps the most important skill in communicating, is knowing how to use a period.

[@ramadanhasani]

What makes a violation fatal exactly?

[@keegster7167]

nothing...?

[@scalpeldude]

yay

[@omytouma6235]

wait so how do we know where to place the violations?

[@mintcarouselchannelabandon5109]

do you mean "how do we tell how the constraints are ranked" or? because where we place the violation is, for each column, we mark at each intersecting row where the input for that row violates the column's constraint. but i feel like you knew that already?

[@came6077]

日本語にもともとvの音は無いので、 表記上はve(ヴェ)になっていても、実際はbe(ベ)と発音されることが多いですね

[@mariafernandagonzalezdavil5647]

why is there a strawberry jam in the bookshelf ?

[@minsklit5811]

Pyralsprite

[@thelingspace]

I was so happy to get that at VidCon, and it still has a place of pride on my shelf. ^_^

[@thefinesofthetime2]

Oh wait, Japanese does not have the "V" sound, they pronounce them like "b" so that the "Venom" is actually pronounced as "Benomu".

[@ryanramos2412]

BlezentFott that’s not completely true. They do tend to replace the “v” sound with a “b” sound, but that’s only because they do not have the “v” sound at all in general Japanese phonology. Nonetheless, they have a character which differentiates the “v” from the “b” sound that is used for loan words, ヴ. Most Japanese people don’t even know how to pronounce the “v” sound, so they just pronounce it as a normal “b”, but my guess is that those who know how to pronounce it tend to do it the way it’s supposed to be.

[@ryanw8509]

@@ryanramos2412 I doubt that. I lived in Korea for a year which similarly has no [v] and nobody says the [v] in "Venom" when speaking Korean, even if they are fluent English speakers.

[@prezentoappr1171]

@@ryanw8509 so how do they swap the v as?

[@prezentoappr1171]

@@ryanramos2412 theres also ウィ/u+small i for w even tho from english its virus>wirusu

[@wareya]

Isn't this phonotactics?

[@chychychitz6682]

this is so fuking confusing haaaaaah..how does OT apply to reduplication

[@lorijewel8833]

Eddie busted

[@theotsafa]

I think the video has substance but the lecturer speaks too fast and packs too much info together in seconds that it is really hard to keep up with him. It doesn't look like he expects viewers to understand him; it looks more to me like he has an outline he's so focused on finishing within the shortest possible time. Slow down the pace and your presentation will be wonderful.

[@nathanwolfson2966]

As a linguist, this "theory" is completely arbitrary and should be thrown out.