Dissertation - Michael Becker

A fully general mechanism for finding underlying representations algorithmically isyet to be proposed, although significant headway way made by Tesar (2006), Merchant(2008), and in parallel lines of work, also by Boersma (2001) and Apoussidou (2007) andby Jarosz (2006). A central component of the current proposal is the assumption that rootsare always surface-true, so the search for non-surface-true forms is limited to affixes. Sincecross-linguistically, affixes are small in size and in number compared to roots, the searchfor their UR’s is likely to produce manageable results in realistic cases.The algorithm starts with a given affix, such as the possessive affix in Turkish, anda set of stems that combine with it. In this situation, there might be a lexically-specificphonological process involved, also known as a lexical trend. Each affix defines a set ofparadigms, or a set of pairs of output forms, where each pair consists of a base and aderived form. A prerequisite for discovering the lexical trend is to assume the surface formof the base as its underlying form. The reasons for this prerequisite are discussed in detailin §4.4, but in a nutshell, the problem is that assigning non-suface-true information to thebase could prevent the learner from cloning constraints and listing roots in their domains,making lexical trends unavailable to the grammar.In the cases presented below, the base is a simple bare root.In some languages,however, bare roots do not surface, and the bases of affixation already have some obligatoryinflection on them, such as a third person marker or a nominative marker. To learn a trendin such a situation, the learner will have to identify the presence of this affix and strip itoff. This extra step is abstracted from in the present discussion, and the assessment of itsimpact on the process is left for future work.In the Turkish possessive, assuming the surface form of the base and the surface formof the possessive suffix as their respective UR is all the speaker needs to learn the lexicaltrend. These surface-true underlying forms will allow the speaker to discover conflictingevidence about the ranking of, e.g., *VÙV and IDENT(voice), as discussed in §4.4 and inchapter 2.178