John Alderete

Reduplication with Fixed Segmentism

Fixed segmentism is the phenomenon whereby a reduplicative morpheme contains segments that are invariant rather than copied. We investigate it within Optimality Theory, arguing that it falls into two distinct types, phonological and morphological. Phonological fixed segmentism is analyzed under the OT rubric of emergence of the unmarked. It therefore has significant connections to markedness theory, sharing properties with other domains where markedness is relevant and showing context-dependence. In contrast, morphological fixed segmentism is a kind of affixation, and so it resembles affixing morphology generally. The two types are contrasted, and claims about impossible patterns of fixed segmentism are developed.

Dominance Effects as Transde rivational Anti-Faithfulness *

This paper presents a theory of morpho-phonological alternations based on a development in the theory of faithfulness in Optimality Theory. A new type of constraint, anti-faithfulness, is proposed which evaluates a pair of morphologically related words and requires an alternation in the shared stem. This constraint type is motivated initially by the properties of exchange rules, as anti-faithfulness provides a direct account of alternations which involve a full rotation of some feature. This thesis is then applied to a thorny problem in the analysis of accentual systems, namely affixes which idiosyncratically cause a deletion of the accent in a neighboring morpheme (a process sometimes called a ‘dominance effect’). It is argued that anti-faithfulness both motivates the observed deletion, and accounts for the properties of dominance effects with principles that are generally available in phonological theory. The ideas inherent to anti-faithfulness are then shown to extend naturally to the analysis of other affix-induced alternations, including preand postaccentuation (or accent insertions), accentual shifts, retraction of stress and tone, and tone spread. These alternations are examined in the accentual systems of Tokyo Japanese and a Limburgian dialect of Dutch, and it is argued that anti-faithfulness theory is superior to the plausible alternatives because it provides a unified account of the diverse range of morpho-accentual processes found in these systems.

Surgery in Language Learning

The architecture of generative phonology brings with it a difficult challenge for any learner: underlying forms must be acquired at the same time as the phonology – the system of rules or constraint-rankings. Yet, each depends on the other, and neither is known in advance. If the learner had prior knowledge of the underlying forms, then the constraint-ranking could be determined by familiar procedures. If the learner knew the ranking, then the range of viable underlying forms would be greatly limited, simplifying the process of finding them. In addition, the learner must identify a phonology which is maximally restrictive, so that distributional restrictions implicit in the data are enforced, rather than being portrayed as accidental gaps in the lexicon. Since it is impossible to explore all possible lexicon-phonology pairings, an effective learner must use an incremental strategy which goes back and forth between hypotheses about the lexicon and hypotheses about the phonology, testing and improving each until a satisfactory match is found. A principal issue in designing any such procedure is deciding what to do when the mapping fails: should the lexicon be changed or should the phonology be changed?

Root-Controlled Accent In Cupeño

Recent work on the nature of faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) has proposed distinct faithfulness constraints for roots and affixes. The distinction between root and affix faithfulness has been employed in the analysis of the privileged status of roots in a variety of phonological systems, such as root-controlled vowel harmony.In this article, I argue that this distinction is equally important in explaining the observation in Cupeño that inherent accent in roots takesprecedence over inherent accent in affixes. In addition, morphologicallydispersed faithfulness is shown to be instrumental in extending the analysisbeyond previous accounts, providing the right tools for the analysis ofpre-accentuation and the special phonology of the nominalizer suffix.

Prosodic Faithfulness in Cupeño

In studies of word stress, the distinction is often made between a default or canonical pattern, and one or more exceptional stress patterns. While the latter class of patterns has been studied in some detail, there is little consensus in the theoretical literature concerning the formal treatment of exceptional stress. Some have taken a representational approach, namely one in which the idiosyncratic properties of exceptions are encoded in underlying forms, and where the canonical patterns result from the absence of these underlying prosodic specifications (Liberman & Prince 1977, Hayes 1980, Selkirk 1984, Halle & Vergnaud 1987, and Idsardi 1992; see Inkelas 1994, McCarthy 1995, Pater 1995 for recent work in Optimality Theory, OT henceforth). In endowing lexical structures with prosodic features, these representational theories differ from alternatives which attribute exceptional stress to divergent phonological systems (Harris 1987; Pater 1994, Rosenthall1994, Katayama 1995), or which encode the irregularities in morpheme specific rules or constraints (Franks 1985; Hammond 1995, cf. Russell1995).

Japanese mimetic palatalisation revisited : implications for conflicting directionality*

This article re-examines ‘conflicting directionality’ in Japanese mimetic words, a distributional pattern in which palatalisation is preferentially realised on the rightmost of two coronal consonants, but on the leftmost consonant in a word without coronals. Analysis of the original dictionary evidence given in support of this generalisation and an exhaustive search of the Japanese mimetic stratum reveal both several counterexamples to conflicting directionality and the fact that the datasets are far too small to support linguistic generalisation. The theoretical assumptions employed to account for Japanese mimetic palatalisation are thus re-examined, with a focus on clarifying the predictions for future valid examples of conflicting directionality.

Investigating Perceptual Biases, Data Reliability, and Data Discovery in a Methodology for Collecting Speech Errors From Audio Recordings:

This work describes a methodology of collecting speech errors from audio recordings and investigates how some of its assumptions affect data quality and composition. Speech errors of all types (sound, lexical, syntactic, etc.) were collected by eight data collectors from audio recordings of unscripted English speech. Analysis of these errors showed that: (i) different listeners find different errors in the same audio recordings, but (ii) the frequencies of error patterns are similar across listeners; (iii) errors collected “online” using on the spot observational techniques are more likely to be affected by perceptual biases than “offline” errors collected from audio recordings; and (iv) datasets built from audio recordings can be explored and extended in a number of ways that traditional corpus studies cannot be.

Phonological regularity, perceptual biases, and the role of phonotactics in speech error analysis

Speech errors involving manipulations of sounds tend to be phonologically regular in the sense that they obey the phonotactic rules of well-formed words. We review the empirical evidence for phonological regularity in prior research, including both categorical assessments of words and regularity at the granular level involving specific segments and contexts. Since the reporting of regularity is affected by human perceptual biases, we also document this regularity in a new data set of 2,228 sublexical errors that was collected using methods that are demonstrably less prone to bias. These facts validate the claim that sound errors are overwhelmingly regular, but the new evidence suggests speech errors admit more phonologically ill-formed words than previously thought. Detailed facts of the phonological structure of errors, including this revised standard, are then related to model assumptions in contemporary theories of phonological encoding. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Linguistics > Computational Models of Language Psychology > Language.

Connectionist approaches to generative phonology

While connectionist models are ubiquitous in psycholinguistic approaches to language processing, they are less well-known as generative models of grammar. This work surveys a body of literature in which connectionist models have been developed to address problems central to generative phonology. The focus is on explaining to the newcomer precisely how these models work, and in particular how they grapple with locality, gradience, opacity, and learnability in phonology. An understanding of connectionist phonology both gives a deeper understanding of past developments in phonological theory and a glimpse into its future.

Gradient Vowel Harmony in Oceanic

This article contributes to the understanding of gradient phonological patterns by investigating graded vowel co-occurrence in Oceanic languages. In particular, vowel co-occurrence patterns in disyllabic stems are investigated in four languages: Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, and Fijian, as well as reconstructed forms in Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. With some variation in degree, all languages exhibit an over-representation of identical vowel pairs (e.g. i–i), an under-representation of similar vowel pairs (i–e), and no special restrictions on dissimilar vowel pairs (e.g. i–o). These graded restrictions are also subject to order effects in all languages because the dissimilar > similar inequality in frequency is only found in certain orders. Our focus is on documenting the patterns supporting these generalizations so that future theoretical analysis will rest on strong empirical ground. In addition, we propose one such analysis using gradient constraints on parasitic vowel harmony.