earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider realization of the English inflectional plural suffix /z/ in compounds within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolnesky 1993; McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1995). I show that none of the previous rule-based analyses provide a satisfactory and unified account of the phenomena. I argue that plural affixation that occurs in compounds is best analyzed in Optimality Theory in terms of Generalized Alignment Constraint (McCarthy & Prince 1993) and Lexically Indexed Markedness Constraint (Pater 2000). I specifically propose lexically indexed markedness constraints WORDPLURALL and WORDPLURALP, which apply only to those lexical items indexed for their application. WORDPLURALL outranks alignment constraint ALIGNPLURALHEAD, which in turn ranks above another lexically indexed markedness constraint WORDPLURALP, while WORDPLURALL ranks beneath the general markedness constraint NOPLURALADJECTIVE. With the constraint ranking, it is shown that realization of the English inflectional plural suffix /z/ in compounds can be accounted for in a straightforward way. I also show that plural formation of compounds such as ‘craftsman,’ which could not be accounted for within the framework of Lexical Morphology & Phonology, are best analyzed under the analysis assumed in this paper.