Dissertation - Michael Becker

(100) LOCAL(o) xalon ≫ φ-MATCH ≫ LOCAL(o) alonAs the learner encounters more nouns with [o] in their final syllable, the conflictbetween φ-MATCH and LOCAL(o) will cause more nouns to be associated with one ofthe clones of LOCAL(o). Nouns that take –ot will be associated with the higher rankingclone, and nouns that take –im will be associated with the lower ranking clone.(101) LOCAL(o) {xalon, makom, ...} ≫ φ-MATCH ≫ LOCAL(o) {alon, Saon, pagoS, ...}Since nouns like Sém, which don’t have [o] in them, are neither preferred nor dispreferredby LOCAL(o), they will not be assigned a W or an L by LOCAL(o), and thuswill not be associated with either clone.Of the nouns with [o] in their final syllable in Bolozky & Becker (2006), 146 are ottakersand 377 are im-takers. A speaker who learns all of them will end up with a grammarsuch as the one in (102) 15 .(102) LOCAL(o) 146 items ≫ φ-MATCH ≫ LOCAL(o) 377 itemsThe grammar in (102) achieves two goals at once: It encodes the behavior of theexisting nouns of Hebrew by associating them with one of the clones of LOCAL(o), andsince it has a list of im-takers and a list of ot-taker, the grammar lets the learner discoverthe proportion of ot-takers among the the nouns that have [o] in them. This information, inturn, can be used to project the relative number of im-takers and ot-takers onto novel nouns.Once LOCAL(o) is cloned, and each clone is made lexically-specific, there is no longera general LOCAL(o) constraint that can apply to novel items. When faced with a novelnoun that has [o] in its final syllable, the speaker must decide which clone of LOCAL(o) toassociate it with, and this decision will be influenced by the number of items associated witheach clone. Since 27.9% of the nouns associated with clones of LOCAL(o) are associatedwith its higher ranking clone, the learner will have a chance of 27.9% of choosing -ot.15 This picture is somewhat simplified, since the set of ot-takers with a final [o] is not homogeneous, asdescribed in §3.2.102