Dissertation - Michael Becker

frequency of ot-taking in the lexicon relative to the presence and position of a root [o], and(c) project the frequencies of the lexicon onto novel items. Such a mechanism is outlinedhere, and in chapter 2; the full proposal is detailed in chapter 4.The analysis relies on learners’ ability to identify cases where there is no singlegrammar that can apply successfully to all of the words of their language. The RecursiveConstraint Demotion algorithm (RCD, Tesar & Smolensky 1998, 2000; Tesar 1998; Prince2002) allows language learners to collect ranking arguments from different lexical itemsand find conflicting rankings.The use of RCD is most clearly illustrated with comparative tableaux (Prince 2002),where pairs of winners and losers are compared as to how they fare on various constraints.For example, the plural form of xalón ‘window’ is xalon-ót, so the learner has to makesure that xalon-ót wins over the intended loser xalon-ím. The constraint φ-MATCH prefersxalon-ím, while the constraint LOCAL(o) prefers xalon-ót, so if xalon-ót is to win, theconstraint that prefers the winner must be ranked over the constraint that prefers the loser.This situation is shown with the winner-loser pair in (98a), with LOCAL(o) assigning a W(“Winner preferring”) to it and φ-MATCH assigning an L (“Loser preferring”).Similarly, the winner-loser pair in (98b) shows the im-taker alón ‘oak tree’, whichrequires the ranking of φ-MATCH over LOCAL(o).(98)LOCAL(o)φ-MATCHa. xalon-ót ≻ *xalon-ím W Lb. alon-ím ≻ *alon-ót L WGiven a comparative tableau, the learner can extract a constraint ranking from it byfinding columns that have only W’s or empty cells in them, and installing the constraintsin those columns. Installing a constraint means that it is added to the constraint ranking100