<OT> New Posting: ROA-648

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 648-0304

A Stochastic OT account of paralinguistic tasks such as grammaticality and prototypicality judgments

Paul Boersma <paul.boersma at uva.nl>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=648


Abstract:
It has been observed that grammaticality judgments do not
necessarily reflect relative corpus frequencies: it is possible
that structure A is judged as more grammatical than structure
B, whereas at the same time structure B occurs more often
in actual language data than structure A. In recent work
(Boersma & Hayes 2001), we have used Stochastic Optimality
Theory to model grammaticality judgments in exactly the
same way as corpus frequencies, namely as the result of
noisy evaluation of constraints ranked along a continuous
scale. At first sight, therefore, this model seems not to
be able to handle the observed facts: linguistic forms that
have zero corpus frequency due to harmonic bounding often
turn out not to be totally ungrammatical (Keller & Asudeh
2002), and 'ideal' forms found in experiments on prototypicality
judgments often turn out to be peripheral within the corpus
distribution of their grammatical category (Johnson, Flemming
& Wright 1993). In this paper, I argue that the paradox
is solved by assuming a listener-oriented grammar model
(Boersma 1998), in phonology as well as in syntax. In that
grammar model, the natural way to derive (relative) corpus
frequency is to measure the production process, whereas
grammaticality judgments naturally derive from a simpler
process, namely the inverted interpretation process.

Comments: 
Keywords: grammaticality, prototype, stochastic OT, perception, acquisition, frequency
Areas: Phonology,Syntax,Phonetics,Language Acquisition,Learnability
Type: Book Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=648