Essays from The Guardian

Abstract

Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. Published alongside Pater's collected works of 1900–1, this collection reprints his essays from The Guardian, composed in the late 1880s. Pater turns to literary topics with these reviews of new editions of Wordsworth and anthologies of poetry, academic studies on Browning and on the English theatre, Mrs Humphrey Ward's novel Robert Elsmere and her translation of the philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel's private diary, as well as works by Edmund Gosse, Ferdinand Fabre and Augustin Filon.

Indexation to stems and words

“…Phonology is frequently sensitive to properties of the morphemes to which an operation or constraint applies. In Optimality Theory (OT), one way to account for this is by allowing constraints to be indexed to certain classes of words, for example roots (McCarthy & Prince 1993), loanwords (Itô & Mester 1995, 2001), nouns (Smith 2001), specific lexical items (Pater 2000, Becker et al 2011, Gouskova 2012) or exceptional suffixes (Pater 2007, 2009).…”

“…An important observation of work on constraint indexation has been that morphologically sensitive constraint evaluation is local : the presence of an exceptional affix in a word does not cause other affixes to behave as though they were also exceptional. To account for this, Pater (2007, 2009) explicitly limits the reach of indexed constraints with the metaconstraint in (2), so that the locus of violation of an indexed constraint must be within the morpheme with that index. …”

“…Unlike most previously described MDEEs, in this pattern the alternating segment can be at any distance from the triggering affix. Because of this, and because the alternation does not depend on the segmental content of the affix, non-local MDEEs cannot be accounted for by systems of constraint indexation like that proposed in Pater (2007, 2009), which requires that the locus of violation involve an exponent of the indexed morpheme (in this case the affix).…”

Rachel Walker (2011). Vowel patterns in language. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 130.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. x + 356.

“…Walker's response is to lexically index these affixes, and to make licensing constraints specific to these indices. At first, this appears to be a straightforward extension of a lexical indexation approach, in which both faithfulness and markedness constraints may be indexed (Itô & Mester 1995, 2003, Pater 2000, 2007, 2009, Flack 2007, Gouskova 2007, Jurgec 2010). However, compared to the existing literature, Walker goes one step further.…”

“…Indexed constraints in the literature typically refer only to the indexed morpheme, and can see any non-indexed material to a limited degree. For example, Pater (2009) uses alignment constraints that require an indexed morpheme to be aligned with a heteromorphemic consonant. Walker's indexed licensing constraints are consistent with Pater's locality convention, but these constraints are not lexically specific to the contextual restriction.…”