<OT> New Posting: ROA-739

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 739-0505

Learning a Stratified Grammar

Joe Pater <pater at linguist.umass.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=739


Abstract:
This paper shows that a simple extension of the Biased Constraint
Demotion Algorithm (Prince and Tesar 2004) results in the
construction of stratified grammars (Ito and Mester 1999).
Phonological structures are sometimes restricted to particular
sets of words, such as loanwords. To capture such generalizations
, Ito and Mester (1999) propose that faithfulness constraints
applying to subsets of the lexicon are interspersed between
markedness constraints. Three learnability problems present
themselves: 1. How does a learner create lexically specific
constraints for exceptions to phonotactics? 2. How do the
markedness constraints get in the right order? 3. How do
the faithfulness constraints get interspersed correctly?
To address 1, this paper proposes that when a learner encounters
a form that requires an adjustment to the grammar, it makes
the initial conservative assumption that this adjustment
is specific to that word. More formally, in terms of Tesar
and Smolensky (1998) et seq., when Error-Driven Constraint
Demotion produces a Mark-Data pair, faithfulness constraints
preferring the winner are indexed to the lexical item in
question. With this one assumption, Biased Constraint Demotion
automatically yields answers to problems 2 and 3. In applying
lexically specific constraints to instances of gradient
phonotactics, this paper also suggests an approach to the
problems raised by Frisch, Pierrehumbert and Broe (2004).

Comments: Has minor corrections from published version, can be cited as in the Proceedings of the 29th Boston University Conference on Language Development, edited by Alejna Brugos, Manuella R. Clark-Cotton, and Seungwan Ha, Cascadilla Press, Somerville, MA. 2005.
Keywords: learnability, gradience, phonotactics, strata, lexically specific constraints
Areas: Phonology,Learnability
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=739