Dissertation - Michael Becker

and the learner’s form are different, i.e. an error is made, the learner pairs the adult formwith their own form, to make a winner-loser pair (178).(178)MAXNOCODAa. pak ≻ pa W LApplying RCD to the Support in (178) will give rise to the ranking MAX ≫ NOCODA.This ranking in turn allows the learner to produce codas faithfully.Learning is errordrivenin the sense that learning continues for as long as the learner generates forms thatare different from the observed adult forms, and therefore the learner’s grammar is notyet identical to the adult’s grammar. If, as I suggest, learning lexical trends requires anadjustment to the grammar each time a new word is learned, then error-driven learning willcontinue for as long as new words are learned.Initially, the child will assume the simple case, where one constraint ranking willaccount for all of the phonology of the language, no constraints are cloned, and noconstraints list lexical items. A learner of Turkish will be able to maintain this hypothesisuntil they are confronted with positive evidence for inconsistency. For t-final words, thiswill happen when the learner discovers at least one t-final noun that alternates (e.g. tat ∼tad-1 ‘taste’) and at least one t-final noun that doesn’t (e.g. at ∼ at-1 ‘horse’). When thefirst alternating noun is discovered (e.g. tat ∼ tad-1), the learner will demote IDENT(voice)to rank below *VtV. 13 The winner-loser pair tad-1 ≻ tat-1 will be kept as evidence for thenew ranking. Then, when the learner encounters the non-alternating at, their grammar willwrongly produce the alternating possessive form *ad-1. If the learner observes that the13 Recall that is ranking is only necessary when the learner discovers the existence of morphologicalparadigms. In unanalyzed forms of the language, intervocalic [t]’s are allowed to stay voiceless (e.g. ata‘father’ vs. ada ‘island’), so the learner has previously learned that IDENT(voice) ≫ *VtV as part of learningthe phonotactics of the language.186