English Dialects and Optimality Theory : Prominent Feature Hypothesis

Abstract

This study investigates variation in Optimality Theory. Variation is the case of a single underlying form being mapped onto multiple outputs. Dialectal variants are realizations of the same input. However, many lexical items of historically and geographically close languages share the same input at the phonological level. Thus, the same input can be mapped onto not only variants of one language, but also those of other languages. However, the way to distinguish variants of one language from those of another language inside phonological theories has never been examined. This paper puts forward the Prominent Feature Hypothesis which states that the variants of a particular language share some features in the contents of change process, and attempts to validate the hypothesis from Optimality-theoretic point of view.