Dissertation - Michael Becker

items, and lexically-specific processes, which always apply to one list of lexical itemsand never apply to a second list of items.This is an oversimplification, of course.While lexically-specific processes typically do not involve variation for most of the itemsinvolved, variation is not completely absent. Of the 3002 stop-final nouns in TELL (Inkelaset al. 2000), for instance, the vast majority behave consistently, but 103 items (3%) showthe voicing alternation optionally. Note that the data in TELL represents inter-speakervariation, since it records the knowledge of a single native speaker. A variable grammar isneeded for the representation of a single speakers’ grammar, not just for the grammar ofthe speech community.In the Cloning RCD, the variable behavior of a lexical item can be represented in twoways: Either the lexical item is listed with both clones of a constraint, in which case it ispredicted to undergo the relevant lexically-specific process 50% of the time, or the lexicalitem resists listing, in which case it is predicted to undergo the lexically-specific processas often as novel items do (cf. a similar suggestion in Pater 2008b). If the learner hearsan item behaving inconsistently in the ambient language, it seems plausible that they willrefrain from listing the item, or that they will list it twice. This approach predicts thatlexical items that undergo a lexically-specific process optionally will show one of the twobehaviors mentioned above; unfortunately, it is not known whether this prediction is corrector not. 14A different approach to variability in Optimality Theory is stochastic grammar (Boersma1997, Boersma & Hayes 2001, et seq.), where constraints are arranged on a numerical scale,and each constraint defines a normal distribution somewhere on the scale. Each time thegrammar is used in a derivation, a ranking value for each constraint is assigned by sampling14 Some suggestive, possibly promising, numbers come from Google searches on Hebrew ot-takers. MostHebrew nouns take one of the plural suffixes, –im or –ot, categorically. Searching for the two plural forms foreach item and comparing the number of hits, this categorical behavior is reflected in a rate of ot-taking thatis close to 0% or to 100% for any given item. A small number of items have ot-taking rates in the 40–50%range, and smaller number still have rates in the 10–20% range. Interestingly, no items were found in the50–97% range.189