[lingtalks] Linguistics Colloquium May 1

[Katie McGee]

Our speaker for colloquium on Monday, May 1st is

Bruce Hayes, UCLA

"A model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning"

Time: 2-3:30
Place: 2148 McGill (TV Studio)
Date: Monday, May 1st

Abstract below.


  

A Model of Phonotactics and Phonotactic Learning

 

Bruce Hayes

Department of Linguistics

UCLA

 

 

This work is a collaboration with my colleague Colin Wilson.

 

 

Phonotactics is the study of well-formedness in phonological representations.  Although this topic has always been important to phonologists, no complete phonotactic analysis of a language has ever been produced.  This is due to (a) the size of the problem, and (b) difficulty in modeling the gradience always observed in phonotactic well-formedness intuitions.   

 

Our approach is based on several recent theoretical ideas.  

 

·      Following Boersma, Goldwater and Johnson, and others, we assume that phonological constraints should be assigned numerical strengths rather than ordinally ranked; the result is a grammar that can model gradient intuitions.   

·      Following Frisch, Pierrehumbert, and others, we assume that much of the gradience of intuitions matches the quantitative pattern of the lexicon:  that which is underrepresented is felt by native speakers to be less well formed.  

·      To deal with the large size of the problem, we abandon traditional yellow-pad analysis and instead use a learning algorithm.   Given a training set of well-formed words, our algorithm selects from the constraints made available under a particular version of phonological theory, assigns weights to the selected constraints, and uses them to make predictions about the well-formedness of novel words (e.g. ü[blIk] vs. *[bnIk]). 

 

We have applied our model several phonotactic problems:  English syllable onsets, Shona vowel harmony, quantity-insensitive stress systems (Gordon 2002), and the complete phonotactics of Wargamay (Dixon 1981).   Our modeling can be taken as support for various proposals from the phonological literature concerning representations (autosegmental, metrical, etc.):  we often find that a phonotactic pattern is learnable by our system only when the training data are represented using an appropriate theory.

 

 
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