Dissertation - Michael Becker

irrelevant for the derivation of y1l, and there is no need to update the grammar with thislexical item.This process goes on with every new word the learner encounters, with non-t-finalwords going unlisted, and t-final words being listed with one of the clones of *VtV. Theresulting grammar contains a list of alternating t-final nouns and a list of non-alternatingt-final nouns. Now, when a learner encounters a novel t-final noun, and they don’t knowwhat the possessive form of it is, they can make an estimate that is based on the words theyhave learned. If the list of non-alternating t-final nouns has 102 items in it, and the list ofalternating t-final nouns has 18 items in it (as in TELL, Inkelas et al. 2000), then the chanceof the novel noun to be alternating is 18 out of (18+102), which is 15%.This method for generating losers and using them to feed the Cloning RCD is essentiallyidentical to the original proposal of Tesar & Smolensky (2000), with the added assumptionthat error-driven learning continues as long as the speaker continues to learn new lexicalitems. The need to run a new form through more than one grammar, however, raises aconcern about the number of those grammars. If a learner has cloned n constraints, thatmeans that they are potentially dealing with 2 n grammars, which in turn means that everynew form they encounter must be run through each of these 2 n grammars, thus greatlyincreasing the computational load for the learner. This worry is almost certainly overstatedhere. Given that lexical trends can be independent of each other, as seen in §4.2.2, trying outall of their combinations will be wasteful, since it will suffice to test two grammars for anyset of independent trends. Because the learner can find out whether trends are dependenton each other by inspecting the Support, they will be able to use this information to reducethe number of grammar to try out. The details of this mechanism are left for future work.4.3.7 Exceptionality and variationThe Cloning RCD algorithm offered here presupposes the existence of only twokinds of phonological processes: Regular processes, which apply to all available lexical188