Alan Prince

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Linguistics, Faculty Member

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In recent years, I've worked on developing an understanding of the structure of Optimality Theory (OT) and how that shapes the requirements and possibilities of valid analysis. This rests on my prior work in prosodic morphology and phonology as well as on a personal inclination to view the theory itself as a sometimes refractory and surprising object as much in need of study as the factual world it aims to render.

I have been fortunate in that I've been able to work with a range of extraordinary individuals on topics of mutual interest. At the present writing (Oct. 2021) these prominently include Birgit Alber, with whom I've developed a theory of the macro-structure of OT typologies under the name of 'Property Theory'; Naz Merchant, with whom I have unraveled a certain amount of the intrinsic algebraic and geometric structure of OT; and Natalie DelBusso, a virtuoso of formal typological analysis. More distantly in time, Mark Liberman, John McCarthy, Steven Pinker, Paul Smolensky, Vieri Samek-Lodovici, Bruce Tesar, and Adrian Brasoveanu have been significant presences in the work assembled here, and anyone who finds threads of interest in it should look to their individual contributions as well.

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136 Papers
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Papers by Alan Prince

Generalization-Forms in Domination Hierarchies II: Do Something Except When: Blocking, or the Theory of Profuseness

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 30, 2008

Ranking and necessity: the Fusional Reduction Algorithm

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Aug 31, 2010

Understanding a linguistic theory within OT requires an exact characterization of the ranking con... more Understanding a linguistic theory within OT requires an exact characterization of the ranking conditions necessitated by data. These conditions determine the formal shape of the grammar while providing the crucial link between the data and its interpretation. We introduce an algorithm ('Fusional Reduction', FRed) which calculates the necessary and sufficient ranking conditions inherent in any collection of candidates and presents them in a maximally concise and informative way. The algorithm, stemming from the original proposal of Brasoveanu 2003, is set within the fusional ERC theory of Prince 2002a. In this context, the Most Informative Basis and the Skeletal Basis emerge as the two important types of reduced representations of ranking structure. We examine their properties and show how FRed produces them from data. Fine-grained FRed is compared with broad-stroke RCD (Tesar and Smolensky 1993, Tesar 1995 et seq.), and RCD is reinterpreted and embraced within FRed as a simplified, information-losing sub-case. Finally, FRed is compared with other related algorithms in structure, worst-case complexity, and relevance to the analytical enterprise. This paper revises Brasoveanu and Prince 2005, 2007; Prince and Brasoveanu 2010 gives a more formal perspective, with proof of the theorems.

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Rules and Connections in Human Language

Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 25, 2013

ABSTRACT

Generalized Alignment: Prosody

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 21, 2008

Syllable Structure Typology: The CV Theory

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 30, 2008

The Nature of Human Concepts

Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 25, 2013

Generalized Alignment: The Prosody-Morphology Interface

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 21, 2008

Metrical Forms

Elsevier eBooks, 1989

From intensional properties to universal support

Language, 2016

A factorial typology is a set of grammars. We are not given the grammars directly, but must deduc... more A factorial typology is a set of grammars. We are not given the grammars directly, but must deduce them from the way that the posited constraints deal with the posited structures. How do we know that the candidate sets we have examined are sufficient to discriminate all the grammars that are allowed by our assumptions? This is the problem of finding a universal support for a typology. Without a universal support, we don't have the typology, and without the typology, many types of systematic claims about it must languish unjustified. Here we show how the universal status of a proposed support may be established when we have exact descriptions of the types of optima allowed in the grammars. If a typology is factored into (intensional) ranking properties in the sense of Alber & Prince (in prep.), and if the property values are associated with (extensional) characteristics carried by optima, then a grammar as a combination of values is associated with a description of its optima as a conjunction of the characteristics associated with the values. If the descriptions thereby obtained uniquely denote single candidates, then the grammars cannot be further refined, and the support that produced the grammars must be universal. This method of associating extensional characteristics with ranking patterns answers a much more general question: what do the languages of a typology look like? Since a typology is generated from a finite sample of candidate sets, we cannot in general be satisfied with remarking about the distribution of characteristics in the sample. We must use the grammars to project over the entire set of optima. The grammatical structure relevant to this enterprise is encoded in the ranking properties that combine to give the grammars.

format_quoteThis paper demonstrates how to derive a universal support from a classification of intensional properties for Optimality Theory (OT) systems.format_quote

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Universal Syllable Theory: Ordinal Construction of C/V and Onset/Coda Licensing Asymmetry

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 30, 2008

The Emergence of the Unmarked

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 21, 2008

Optimality: From Neural Networks to Universal Grammar

Science, Mar 14, 1997

Can concepts from the theory of neural computation contribute to formal theories of the mind? Rec... more Can concepts from the theory of neural computation contribute to formal theories of the mind? Recent research has explored the implications of one principle of neural computation, optimization, for the theory of grammar. Optimization over symbolic linguistic structures provides the core of a new grammatical architecture, optimality theory. The proposition that grammaticality equals optimality sheds light on a wide range of phenomena, from the gulf between production and comprehension in child language, to language learnability, to the fundamental questions of linguistic theory: What is it that the grammars of all languages share, and how may they differ? A.

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Generalized Alignment: Introduction and Theory

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 21, 2008

... Some examples include: In English, Garawa, Indonesian and a number of other languages, the ... more ... Some examples include: In English, Garawa, Indonesian and a number of other languages, the normal right-to-left alternation of stress is interrupted word-initially: (1) Initial Secondary Stress in English (Tata) ma (gouche)* Ta (tama)(gouche) (Luxa) pa (lila)* Lu (xapa)(h&amp;#x27;la ...

The pursuit of theory

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 23, 2010

The first of these arises because a theory is the totality of its consequences. It must be given ... more The first of these arises because a theory is the totality of its consequences. It must be given as the set of its defining conditions, and we may polish them, ground them, tailor them to meet various expectations, but unless we have mapped out what follows from them, the theory remains alien territory. Newton’s theory of gravitation can be written on a postcard, and we might like to think of it as nothing more than what makes apples fall straight to earth and planets follow simple repetitive paths, but its actual content is strange beyond imagining and still under study hundreds of years after it was stated. Once formulated, a theory has broken definitively with intuition and belief.We are stuckwith its consequences whether we like themor not, anticipate them or not, and we must develop techniques to find them. The second question arises because the internal logic of a theory determines what counts as a sound argument within its premises. General principles of rigor and validation apply, of course, but unless connected properly with the specific assumptions in question, the result can easily be oversight and gross error. Here’s an example: in many linguistic theories developed since the 1960s, violating a constraint leads directly to ungrammaticality. A parochial onlooker might get the intuition that violation is somehow ineluctably synonymous with ill-formedness, in the nature of things. A grand conclusion may then be thought to follow:

Two lectures on prosodic morphology

This document contains handouts and transcripts (prepared from a contemporaneous tape recording) ... more This document contains handouts and transcripts (prepared from a contemporaneous tape recording) of two lectures presented at the OTS/HIL Workshop on Prosodic Morphology, held at the University of Utrecht, June 22-24, 1994. We are grateful to the participants in the Workshop and to the organizers, René Kager, Harry van der Hulst, and Wim Zonneveld. The article "Reduplicative Identity" is an exploration of some of the points raised in the second lecture.

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Surgery in Language Learning

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The phonology and morphology of Tiberian Hebrew

format_quoteThis study reveals that Hebrew phonology involves complex stress-related syllable mutations and supports the SPE theory's linear ordering of rules.format_quote

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<i>Faithfulness and identity in Prosodic Morphology</i>

Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 6, 1999

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Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar

Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 21, 2008

Special thanks to John McCarthy for detailed discussion of virtually every issue raised here and ... more Special thanks to John McCarthy for detailed discussion of virtually every issue raised here and for a fine-grained skepsis of the entire first draft of the ms., which resulted in innumerable improvements and would have resulted in innumerably more, were this a better world. We are particularly grateful for his comments and suggestions in r' Chs. 7 and 9. We also wish to thank

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L'émergence du non-marqué. L'optimalité en morphologie prosodique

Langages, 1997

In Optimality Theory (ОТ ; Prince &amp; Smolensky 1993), linguistic structures emerge from gr... more In Optimality Theory (ОТ ; Prince &amp; Smolensky 1993), linguistic structures emerge from grammatical constraints interaction which assigns to the standard notions of markedness, marked structure, unmarked structure and implicational markedness a precise formal status. This conception is explored in the domain of Prosodie Morphology. The article presents first the basics of the analysis, then formal descriptions of syllabic and morphological aspects of reduplicative patterns. Finally, the theory is tested on the analysis of apparently complex morphophonological dependencies in the reduplicative pattern of Makassarese, an Austronesian language.

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