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UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, no.1

Papers in Phonology 2

edited by Matthew K. Gordon

Table of Contents

Adam Albright
Phonological subregularities in inflectional classes: Evidence from Italian
1–47
Katherine Crosswhite
Inter-paradigmatic homophony avoidance in two dialects of Slavic
48–67
Edward Garrett
Minimal words aren't minimal feet
68–105
Matthew Gordon
A phonetically-driven account of syllable weight
106–166
Bruce Hayes
Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: The early stages
167–206
Robert Kirchner
Preliminary thoughts on 'phonologization' within an exemplar-based speech processing system
207–231

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Abstracts

Adam Albright – Phonological subregularities in inflectional classes: Evidence from Italian

Many languages divide words into arbitrary inflectional classes. When speakers of these languages encounter a new word, they must decide what class the word belongs to. Languages generally solve this problem by having one productive class, which is available to handle new words. According to some linguistic theories, productive classes are generated by special "default" rules, while in other theories, productivity is derived probabilistically by inspecting the lexicon. Probabilistic models predict that phonological form is crucial to class decisions, because they are based on analogy to existing forms. In order to test how sensitive speakers are to phonological form, 27 adult native speakers of Italian were asked to rate novel verbs. Subjects' responses were then compared with predicted values from the Albright and Hayes (1998) "minimal generalization" learner, a computational model which relies entirely on probabilistic guessing. For unproductive classes, subjects' ratings were strongly correlated with the predictions (r = .77, p < .0001 for the strongest class, r = .42, p < .005 for the weakest). Ratings of the productive class were also well correlated with the probabilistic predictions (r = .58, p < .0001). This is supports the idea that both productive and unproductive classes are handled by a single, probabilistic mechanism.

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Katherine Crosswhite – Inter-paradigmatic homophony avoidance in two dialects of Slavic

In this paper, I examine cases of homophony-avoidance, one occurring in the Trigrad dialect of Bulgarian, and the other occurring in Contemporary Standard Russian. In both cases, a productive phonotactic phenomenon of the language (vowel reduction) is either completely or totally blocked just in case its application would cause two morphologically-related forms to become homophonous. Vowel reduction can create homophones in cases where the words involved are not morhpologically related. My analysis of these two cases rests on Correspndence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1996, McCarthy 1995). In particular, the morphological limitations placed on Correspondence predict that honophony-blocking cannot affect non-related words.

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Edward Garrett – Minimal words aren't minimal feet

Since McCarthy and Prince (1986), most linguists have claimed that the minimal content word of a language is equivalent to the minimal foot allowed by the language. In this paper I survey minimal word restrictions in over fifty languages to show that the minimal word syndrome is not connected to foot structure. Instead, in some cases the minimal word of a language is connected to stress properties of the right and/or left edge of the word. For many languages the independently necessary right edge constraint prohibiting final stress, NON-FINALITY (Hyman 1977, Prince and Smolensky 1993, Hung 1994, Walker 1996), predicts minimal word constraints. To handle left edge effects, I introduce a constraint disfavoring stressed syllables which are not preceded by unstressed syllables (which therefore disfavors initial stressed syllables), UPBEAT. In a great many other cases, I show that there is not even a connection between stress and minimality. I account for the minimal word restrictions in these languages with the phonetically motivated constraint BE-LONG, which penalizes short words.

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Matthew Gordon – A phonetically-driven account of syllable weight

It is proposed that syllable weight is driven by considerations of phonetic effectiveness and phonological simplicity. The phonetically best distinctions are claimed to be those which divide syllables into groups which are phonetically most distinct from each other. Phonologically complex distinctions are those which exceed an upper threshold in the number of phonological predicates to which they refer. It is claimed that languages adopt weight distinctions which are phonetically most effective without being overly complex phonologically. Syllable weight thus reflects a compromise between phonetic and phonological factors. The proposed model of weight further suggests that phonological weight distinctions are ultimately predictable from other basic phonological properties, such as syllable structure.

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Bruce Hayes – Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: The early stages

Recent experimental work indicates that by the age of ten months, infants have already learned a great deal about the phonotactics (legal sounds and sound sequences) of their language. This learning occurs before infants can utter words or apprehend most phonological alternations. I will show that this early learning stage can be straightforwardly modeled with Optimality Theory. Specifically, the Markedness and Faithfulness constraints can be ranked so as to characterize the phonotactics, even when no information about morphology or phonological alternations is yet available. I will also show how later on, the information acquired in infancy can help the child in coming to grips with the alternation pattern. I also propose a procedure for undoing the learning errors that are likely to occur at the earliest stages. There are two specific formal proposals. One is a constraint ranking algorithm, based closely on Tesar and Smolensky's Constraint Demotion, which mimics the early, "phonotactics only" form of learning seen in infants. I illustrate the algorithm's effectiveness by having it learn the phonotactic pattern of a simplified language modeled on Korean. The other proposal is that there are three distinct default rankings for phonological constraints: low for ordinary Faithfulness (used in learning phonotactics); low for Faithfulness to adult forms (in the child's own production system); and high for output-to-output correspondence constraints.

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Robert Kirchner – Preliminary thoughts on 'phonologization' within an exemplar-based speech processing system

This paper discusses a particular problem attendant upon the hypothesis that phonological patterns emerge directly from considerations of phonetic functionality: the problem is that phonological patterns frequently display stability across tokens and contexts, where direct phonetic conditioning would predict variation. I suggest that this stabilization might emerge from an exemplar-based speech processing system, which, in essence, enforces the notion of analogical pattern extension.

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