Optimality theory

This paper provides an Optimality-Theoretic account of dissimilation in standard Persian as well as some other accents and dialects of Persian. As such, this work starts by introducing Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) and its basic concepts and then it investigates dissimilation in this framework. It argues for the superiority of OT over derivational approaches regarding a case in which both dissimilation and assimilation, with no clear feeding order, are involved.

This paper aims at describing the mechanism of German loanwords adaptation with respect to constraints of Persian language and within OT framework. Consequently the adaptation of consonant clusters and diphthongs as well as the phonemes substituted in loanwords will be examined. Prince and Smolensky’s (1993) Optimality Theory with its key notions of faithfulness and markedness constraints is suited to model this aspect of linguistic competence. So in this research a number of 30 German loanwords were selected as research data of which some were collected through the library method from written resources and the rest are the trade names of German Products that are collected through a field work. Descriptive analysis of the mentioned data within Optimality Theory comes into valuable linguistic conclusions such as: “In Persian, initial consonant clusters of German loanwords are broken up through vowel epenthesis which is mostly identical to the vowel of the second syllable.”

The Realization Optimality Theory is a recent development in the original Optimality Theory which is proposed to deal with morphological issues especially the inflectional ones. Its main idea is to consider the morphological realization rules as ranked violable language-specific constraints that control the realization processes and provide phonological information of grammatical morphemes. This article deals with the investigation of some morphosyntactic (inflectional) features of modern Persian in Realization Optimality Theory, and shows among the other things that it is a better model for treating inflection than the original Optimality Theory, but it still faces some problems with regard to a language like Modern Persian in which some morphosyntactic features are treated differently in formal and informal varieties, hence separate tableaux with different rankings of constraints are sometimes needed in order to select the optimal candidates in each of those varieties.