Dissertation - Michael Becker

ability to learn a morphological category (the plural in Hebrew, the possessive in Turkish)whose phonological expression involved partially unpredictable behavior, and also projectthe partial predictability onto novel items. For example, a Turkish Ù -final noun can keep thevoiceless [Ù] in the possessive, or it can alternate with the voiced [Ã]. The choice betweenthe voiceless and the alternating stop is partially predictable given the size of the noun:Among the existing Ù -final nouns of Turkish, the alternators are a minority among themono-syllabic nouns, and a majority among the poly-syllabic nouns. Speakers replicatethis difference in novel nouns, choosing alternating stops more often with poly-syllablesthan with mono-syllables.To achieve speakers’ ability to replicate lexical trends, lexical items are added to thedomain of clones, based on each item’s behavior with respect to the clone. Since the clonesassess the morpho-phonological properties of lexical items, it follows from (162) that thedomains of clones contain lexical items that share morpho-phonological properties. Oncethese domains are set up, they give speakers access to the relative prevalence of each patternin the lexicon, allowing them to project this relative prevalence onto novel items.The point to develop here is the exact nature of the domain of cloned constraints. Giventwo winners that require opposite constraint rankings, and hence are put in the domains oftwo different clones, it is not a logical necessity to add the entire winner to the domain ofthe clone. It could be that some part of the winner, e.g. its root, is put in the domain ofthe clone. A related question is about the ability of a clone to assess violations: If a cloneof *VÙV has the bi-morphemic form [taÃ-1] ‘crown.POSSESSIVE’ in its domain, how doesit treat a form that has just one of the two morphemes, such as the homophonous [taÃ-1]‘crown.ACCUSATIVE’? And what happens if an additional morpheme intervenes betweenthe root and the possessive suffix, e.g. [taÃ-1-n1] ‘crown.POSSESSIVE.ACCUSATIVE’?These questions are addressed in this section.The answer I offer is that when the Cloning RCD adds a poly-morphemic word to thedomain of a clone, it separates the word into its immediate morphological constituents,170