Dissertation - Michael Becker

output is not present due to faithfulness, but its presence depends on the presence of theglottal stop in the input (McCarthy 2007a).Faust (2008) offers an analysis of Hebrew in which the plural affix [-ot] phonologicallycontains the feminine suffix [-a]. In terms of OT, this would mean that nouns that end in [-a]select [-ot] via input-output faithfulness to a [−high] feature. An alternative analysis wouldattribute the selection of [-ot] to output-output faithfulness (Benua 1997) to the [−high]feature in [-a]. I leave the exact solution of this issue to future work.3.7 ConclusionsThis chapter examined the distribution of the two plural suffixes –im and –ot on Hebrewnouns.The lexicon study showed a connection between having [o] in the root and apreference for selecting –ot, with the preference being stronger when the [o] is final, andthus adjacent to the suffix, and weaker when the [o] is non-final in the root. In a novel wordtest, speakers replicated the effect that [o] had in the lexicon, choosing –ot as a plural suffixmost often with novel roots that have an [o] in their final syllable, and least often with rootsthat don’t have [o] at all.I offered an OT-based analysis of plural allomorph selection in Hebrew, which reliedon a mechanism of constraint cloning to build lexical trends into the grammar, and projectthose trends onto novel nouns. In the analysis, allomorph selection was understood to bewithout faithfulness cost, and therefore only markedness constraints were involved in theanalysis.Since markedness constraints only assess output forms, they have no access tounderlying representations or to paradigmatically related forms.In deriving Hebrewplurals, the selection of –ot is predicted to correlate with the presence of [o] in the pluralstem, regardless of the vowels of the singular. Since in real Hebrew, the presence of [o] in aplural stem always corresponds to the presence of [o] in the singular, the prediction cannotbe tested on the real words of the language.142