Anthi Revithiadou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
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Around the time of the first ICGL, Malikouti–Drachman wrote two state-of-art-articles, one in 1994 and another in 2001, that critically reviewed significant issues related to Greek Phonology, with a particular focus on the lexical and post-lexical components of grammar. Building on this foundation, the present study aims to explore three central themes that have influenced phonological research on Greek in recent decades from the theoretical standpoint of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993; McCarthy & Prince 1995), a model that has revolutionized phonological analysis. These pivotal topics include: (a) investigating the phonological representation and morphophonological behavior of the palatal glide [j] in Greek and its dialects, as well as the influence of the learned/non-learned vocabulary distinction on its realization; (b) examining the acquisition of Greek phonology as both L1 and L2, and the role of the Lexicon in acquiring phonotactic systematicities; and (c) exploring the various types of prosodic constituents that exist at both the phonological word level and higher levels, along with the question of whether there are reliable diagnostic criteria in the form of sandhi rules for their identification. The investigation concludes by proposing future research directions that utilize the latest theoretical advancements in computational phonological modeling, such as Harmonic Grammars (e.g., Legendre et al. 1990; Smolensky & Legendre 2006) and Maximum Entropy Grammars (e.g., Goldwater & Johnson 2003; Hayes & Wilson 2008).

References

Goldwater, Sharon & Mark Johnson. 2003. Learning OT constraint rankings using a Maximum Entropy model. In Jennifer Spenader, Anders Eriksson & Östen Dahl (eds.), Proceedings of the Stockholm Workshop on Variation within Optimality Theory, 111–120. Stockholm: Stockholm University.

Hayes, Bruce & Colin Wilson. 2008. A Maximum Entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic Learning. Linguistic Inquiry 39(3). 379–440. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2008.39.3.379.

Legendre, Geraldine, Yoshiro Miyata & Paul Smolensky. 1990. Harmonic Grammar – A formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic well-formedness: Theoretical foundations. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 388–395. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McCarthy, John J. & Alan Prince. 1995. Faithfulness and reduplicative Identity. In Jill N. Beckman, Laura Walsh & Suzanne Urbanczyk (eds.), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18: Papers in Optimality Theory, 249–384. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.

Prince, Alan S. & Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in Generative Grammar. Rutgers University & The Johns Hopkins University [RuCCS-TR-2; CU-CS-696-93].

Smolensky, Paul & Géraldine Legendre. 2006. The Harmonic Mind: From Neural Computation to Optimality-Theoretic Grammar, vol. I: Cognitive Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.