Dissertation - Michael Becker

CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTION1.1 Lexical trends and constraint cloningIn a wide variety of languages, there are cases of morphological categories that areexpressed in more than one way. In English, for instance, the past tense is expressed on themajority of verbs by adding –ed, but on some verbs, the past tense is expressed by changinga vowel to [E], e.g. feed ∼ fed, hold ∼ held.A common theme in such limited-scope processes is their reported applicability to novelwords. English speakers, for instance, are willing to offer pred as the past tense of preed,productively extending the limited pattern of changing a root vowel to [E] (Albright &Hayes 2003).Furthermore, speakers’ willingness to apply a limited process to some novel form Xdepends on the number of existing base forms like X that do and don’t undergo the minorityprocess. Speakers are aware of the proportion of the words that undergo a minority processout of the total number of eligible words, i.e. speakers identify a trend in the applicationof the process in their lexicon (henceforth, a lexical trend), and apply this trend to novelitems. Results of this type are reported by Zuraw (2000), Albright & Hayes (2003), Hayes& Londe (2006), Becker, Ketrez & Nevins (2007), and several others.The wish to account for lexical trends in grammatical terms goes back at least asfar as SPE (Chomsky & Halle 1968), where some lexical trends were derived by minorrules, i.e. rules that are formulated using the same mechanisms that are used for regularrules, but with a limited lexical scope. Other grammatical mechanisms, such as stochasticgrammars, were offered in Zuraw (2000) and Hayes & Londe (2006), among others. There1