Dissertation - Michael Becker

faithfulness constraints, add the distinctive features that they refer to asfloating features in /a/, and repeat steps i–iv.The algorithm as it is formulated here does not guarantee that the learner will beprotected from exploring an exponentially large number of hypotheses about the UR ofthe suffix; it simply biases the speaker to find the simplest successful hypothesis as earlyas possible. Since cross-linguistically, affixes are small in size and in number comparedto roots, fixing the UR’s of roots as necessarily surface-true and allowing non-surface trueUR’s only for affixes is likely to produce very manageable results in realistic cases.While the procedure in (177) will find a grammar for the cases discussed in this chapter,a general characterization of the range of cases where (177) will succeed is a matter forfuture research.4.3.6 Supplying losersRecall that the Cloning RCD applies to a Support, which is a set of winner-loserpairs, where the winner and the loser in each pair are derived from a single underlyingrepresentation. The winners are given to the learner by the ambient language, since theseare the surface forms that the learner hears. The underlying representations can be foundgiven the method described in §4.3.5 above. This section now goes on to show how thelearner gets the final piece of the puzzle, the losers.In Error-driven learning, as proposed by Tesar & Smolensky (2000) et seq., the speakerstarts with a grammar that potentially differs from the adult grammar.A discrepancybetween the learner’s current grammar and the target grammar is discovered when thelearner passes an adult form through their grammar, and notices that the output of theirown grammar is different from the adult form. In this situation, the learner’s own output ismarked as a loser, and it is paired with the adult form to make a winner-loser pair.For instance, a child who is learning a language that allows codas, like Turkish, mightproduce the adult form [pak] as [pa], deleting the coda consonant. When the adult form185