Patterned Exceptions in Phonology - UCLA Department of Linguistics

community, attempting to replicate the rates of substitution for various stem types that
can be observed in Spanish loans.
Chapter 4 applies the model to vowel height alternations in Tagalog. Although
vowel raising under suffixation is nearly universal in native words, many loanwords from
Spanish and English have resisted raising. The chapter argues that the main predictor of
whether a word will resist raising is how amenable it is to being construed as reduplicated
(raising is then prevented, because it would disrupt reduplicative identity). It is argued
that a purely phonological mechanism (Aggressive Reduplication) drives such
morphosyntactically unmotivated reduplicated construals. This second case is of interest
because the subregularity involved is quite abstract, and does not emerge
straightforwardly from associative memory.
1.4. Tagalog
Because nearly all the data discussed in the body of this dissertation are from Tagalog,
this section covers some essential facts about the language, and gives details on how
lexical data were obtained. Although this dissertation’s main goal is to present a model of
lexical regularities, I hope that it will also be useful as a source of detailed information on
several aspects of Tagalog phonology.
Tagalog (Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian, Meso
Philippine, Central Philippine, Tagalog) is the national language of the Philippines (in
this role, it is sometimes called Pilipino). It has over 15 million first-language speakers
worldwide (Ethnologue 1996), and is used to some degree by 39 million Pilipinos. First-
language speakers are mainly in Luzon and Mindoro.
The language has long had contact to varying degrees with Chinese, Malay, and
languages of Indonesia and India; a moderate number of loanwords from these languages
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