Outstanding issues and future prospects in Rule-Based Phonology
Bert Vaux, Neil Myler
April 2017 

This chapter surveys some of the main predictive differences between rule- and constraint-based formalisms that have taken center stage in work on Rule-Based Phonology (RBP) since 1993. In addition to the familiar cases of conspiracies (argued to favor Optimality Theory (OT)) and opacity (argued to favor RBP), we review unnatural processes, morpheme structure constraints, and local (as opposed to global) process interactions. We then turn to the larger question of the extent to which naturalness and markedness should be encoded in the phonological component of Universal Grammar, which is in principle orthogonal to the rules vs constraints debate but in practice divides proponents of RBP (many of which support some form of Substance-Free Phonology (Hale and Reiss 2008) and/or Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004)) from supporters of Classic OT (in which substance-based markedness plays a central role in UG). Finally, the chapter identifies prospects for future exploration of language in non-auditory modalities and acquisition as a window into more abstract properties of phonological and general computation, and outlines a possible cross-over between rationalist and empiricist phonological perspectives involving models using information theory and/or Bayesian probability.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005591 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory
keywords:	phonology, rule-based phonology, optimality theory, theory comparison, opacity, conspiracies, unnatural processes, morpheme structure constraints, local process interactions, naturalness, markedness, rule ordering, substance-free phonology, evolutionary phonology, phonology
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