The role of base-ldentity in phonological transfer

Abstract EN

It has long been noted that certain morphologically related words in a language exhibit phonological similarities which are unexpected, given the phonological rules of that language.

It has been argued that Optimaliyt Theory provides a better explanation of this phenomenon than earlier approaches do.

In particular, arguments have been construcred to show that the Base-Identity Constraint is behind these similarites.

Such arguments are taken to be evidence supporting Optimality Theory.

This paper provides additional support in favour of Optimality Theory by providing evidence for the workings of the Base-Identity Constraint in foreign language learning.

In particular, I argue that, under the influence of independently occurring words of the target language, learners rank the Base-Identity Constraint at the top of their Interlanguage constraint hierarchy.

Because of this ranking, I conclude, certain types of pronunciation errors do not appear in the learners’ production of the target language because of transfer rather than because of the lack of it, contrary to what a rule-based contrastive analysis of the source language and the target language would predict.