Application of Optimality Theory in Bangla Syllable Structure (original) (raw)

Abstract

The constraint based stratification in the Optimality Theoretic (OT) framework is the basis of the phonological analysis in many languages. Bangla shows such a diverse scenario in its phonological characteristics while some others are dependent on the stratum where it belongs. The inflectional forms of a particular root lead to various sound change mechanisms in a language. In case of Bangla, it shows a variety of stratum specific operations and different and systematic inflectional forms as well. In this study, a twofold approach to the syllable structure of Bangla is discussed in OT framework. First, the Bangla lexicon is stratified according to the origin of words and then optimality theoretic analysis is applied in the strata according to their respective constraint hierarchy. In the second part, a morphological analysis in the distributed morphology framework is provided for verbal inflections of selected roots from standard Bangla. Finally, some of the questions raised by the morphological analysis are again testified in the optimality theoretic framework. Here, we mainly concentrate in the first part of the study. An extensive corpus study is used in this work in order to determine the frequency of occurrences for a certain sound or cluster of sounds. The findings are basically applied in the optimality theoretic analysis. In general, some of the well known phonological operations, such as gemination, vowel deletion, certain sound-restrictions etc are attempted to be analyzed in the framework of optimality theory and distributed morphology.

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