Dissertation - Michael Becker

With loanwords, plurals are formed without moving the stress away from the root, so apluralized loanword will never surface with final stress 26 .Finally, the preference for –im over –ot in the experiment, as discussed in §3.5, is theclearest indication that participants accepted the artificial nouns as nouns of Hebrew. In theartificial languages, –im and –ot were equally represented, so the higher frequency of –imresponses must be attributed to the influence of real Hebrew. It is very likely that speakersaccepted the artificial nouns as masculine, especially given the numerals and adjectives thatagreed in gender with those nouns in the various frame sentences. However, –im is morefrequent than –ot in real Hebrew overall (since masculine nouns are more than twice ascommon as feminine nouns), so speakers can show a bias for –im even if they ignore thecues for masculine gender in the experiment.3.6.6 Source-oriented generalizations?The aim of this chapter is to highlight the importance of product-oriented generalizationsin phonology, yet it is obviously still the case the languages have sourceorientedgeneralizations. Even the Hebrew plural affix, which I have shown to be subjectto a product-oriented generalization, is also subject to a source-oriented generalization:Loanwords that end in [-a] in the singular invariably take the plural [-ot], regardless of theirgender, as noted in (70) and (71). In other words, the choice of plural affix must also besensitive to some aspect of the input to the derivation.In Optimality Theory, there are two ways in which an output can be sensitive to theinput: The activity of faithfulness can force identity between an input and an output, orsome mechanism of opacity can give rise to structure that depends phonologically on someaspect of the input, e.g. in the Tiberian Hebrew /deSU/ → [deSe], the second [e] in the26 Some nouns that are etymologically borrowed were fully nativized and now get final stress in the plural,e.g. balon-ím ‘baloon’. These nouns are all di-syllabic, just like the majority of native Hebrew nouns (Becker2003).141