<OT> New Posting: ROA-1008

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 1008-1208

Phonological Trends in the Lexicon: The Role of Constraints

Michael Becker <michael at linguist.umass.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1008


Abstract:
This dissertation shows that the generalizations that speakers
project from the lexical exceptions of their language are
biased to be natural and output-oriented, and it offers
a model of the grammar that derives these biases by encoding
lexical exceptions in terms of lexically-specific rankings
of universal constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince &
Smolensky 1993/2004). In this model, lexical trends, i.e.
the trends created by the phonological patterning of lexical
exceptions, are incorporated into a grammar that applies
deterministically to known items, and the same grammar applies
stochastically to novel items. The model is based on the
Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm (Tesar & Smolensky
1998, 2000; Tesar 1998; Prince 2002), augmented with a mechanism
of constraint cloning (Pater 2006, 2008b).

 
Chapter 2 presents a study of Turkish voicing alternations,
showing that speakers replicate the effects that place of
articulation and phonological size have on the distribution
of voicing alternations in the lexicon, yet speakers ignore
the effects of vowel height and backness. This behavior
is tied to the absence of regular effects of vowel quality
on obstruent voicing cross-linguistically, arguing for a
model that derives regular phonology and irregular phonology
from the same universal set of OT constraints.


Chapter 3 presents a study of Hebrew allomorph selection,
where there is a trend for preferring the plural suffix
[-ot] with stems that have [o] in them, which is analyzed
as a markedness pressure. The analysis of the trend in terms
of markedness, i.e. constraints on output forms, predicts
that speakers look to the plural stem vowel in their choice
of the plural suffix, and ignore the singular stem. Since
real Hebrew stems that have [o] in the plural also have
[o] in the singular, Hebrew speakers were taught artificial
languages that paired the suffix [-ot] with stems that have
[o] only in the singular or only in the plural. As predicted,
speakers preferred the pairing of [-ot] with stems that
have [o] in the plural, i.e. speakers prefer the surface-based,
output-oriented generalization.


Chapter 4 develops the formal theory of cloning and its
general application to lexical trends, and explores its
fit with the typologically available data. One necessary
aspect of the theory is the 'inside out' analysis of paradigms
(Hayes 1999), where the underlying representations of roots
are always taken to be identical to their surface base form,
and abstract underlying representations are limited to affixes.
An algorithm for learning the proposed underlying representations
is presented in a general form and is applied to a range
of test cases.

Comments: 
Keywords: lexical exceptions, lexical trends, cloning, naturalness, product-oriented, Turkish, Hebrew
Areas: Phonology,Morphology,Computation,Learnability
Type: PhD Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1008