<OT> New Posting: ROA-668

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 668-0604

The learnability of the stratified phonological lexicon

Mitsuhiko Ota <mits at ling.ed.ac.uk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=668


Abstract:
Many constraint-based accounts of language-internal phonological
inconsistencies appeal to the idea that the phonological
lexicon is stratified into distinct subcomponents. This
article adopts the perspective of the language learner in
reexamining two assumptions related to this approach: 1)
that the membership of any lexical item can be determined
on the basis of distributional evidence (strong lexical
stratification); and 2) that ranking inconsistencies should
be modeled through multiple faithfulness constraints indexed
to different strata (indexed faithfulness). Using the case
of post-nasal voicing in Japanese, it is argued that a phonologic
al grammar with strong lexical stratification cannot be
acquired given the lack of positive distributional evidence
available to the learner. When the strong lexical stratification
hypothesis is retracted, a computational problem emerges
for the acquisition of indexed faithfulness. Taking these
issues into consideration, the article explores a revised
model of lexical stratification that can be learned based
on alternation data and general learning mechanisms.

Comments: To appear in the Journal of Japanese Linguistics, 20 (2004)
Keywords: lexical stratification, indexed constraints, learnability, Japanese
Areas: Phonology, Learnability
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=668