Dissertation - Michael Becker

high success rate, since most masculine nouns are im-takers. The addition of [ot] at the endof just any word would have a low success rate, but the addition of [ot] to a word that endsin [o] followed by a consonant would have a reasonably high success rate.(135) change environment success rateØ → [im] / # ∼97%Ø → [ot] / # ∼3%Ø → [ot] / o C # ∼30%The MGL result is impressive in that it manages to extract a set of generalizationsfrom the rather complex raw data: It identifies the suffixes, and it identifies the kind ofnouns that take them. In this model, however, the similarity between the suffixes and theirenvironment is accidental: It learns nothing about vowel harmony, and could equally welllearn a language, Hebrew ′ , where choosing –ot is correlated with any other phonologicalproperty of the root.When the MGL is applied to the two artifical languages, it identifies two changes ineach language, as shown in (136). The two changes have a success rate of 100% in the twolanguages, since the plural allomorph selection is completely regular. Crucially, these fourchanges are not attested in real Hebrew at all, so the two languages are equally differentfrom real Hebrew, and are thus predicted to be equally easy or equally hard for nativespeakers. Due to the vowel change in the stem, the MGL can no longer separate the suffixes[im] and [ot] from the stem.(136) “surface” language “deep” languageo C → [i C im]i C → [o C ot]o C → [i C ot]i C → [o C im]Albright & Hayes (2003) recognized this aspect of the MGL in its treatment of thevowel changes in the English past tense. English speakers use the vowel [o] (as in drove,139