Dissertation - Michael Becker

The cloning approach offered here and the USELISTED approach share a core property:They both incorporate lexical listing into an OT grammar, thus allowing a single grammarto apply categorically to known items and stochastically to novel items. Arguably, thecloning approach is more appealing on theoretical grounds, since it more parsimonious: Itrelies on the familiar markedness and faithfulness constraints of OT, and does not introducea new kind of constraint that directly accesses the lexicon.Additionally, the cloningapproach makes an unmediated connection between lexical listing and the projection oftrends, as both follow from the association of lexical items with clones. In contrast, theUSELISTED approach relies on a separate learning mechanism to ensure that the stochasticgrammar is synchronized with stored lexical entries.4.4 Moving hidden structure into the grammarThe model proposed here builds speakers’ knowledge of lexical trends into a constraintranking, augmented with cloned constraints. If the language has an irregular phonologicalprocess, and the irregularity can be expressed in phonological terms, then the speaker usescloned constraints to list the lexical items involved, and the resulting constraint ranking isused to project the lexical trend onto novel items.One consequence of this approach is that information about inconsistent patterns inlexical items is built into the grammar rather than being stored in the lexicon. In Turkish,for instance, my analysis attributes the difference between alternating stops (e.g. tat ∼ tad-1‘taste’) and non-alternating stops (e.g. at ∼ at-1 ‘horse’) to lexically-specific rankings offaithfulness and markedness constraints. Both kinds of words have a voiceless stop intheir UR’s (i.e. /tat/, /at/), but the voiceless stop doesn’t always surface faithfully. Incontrast, the traditional generative analysis of Turkish (Inkelas & Orgun 1995; Inkelaset al. 1997; Petrova et al. 2006) attributes the difference to the underlying representations:Non-alternating stops are underlyingly voiceless (or aspirated in Petrova et al. 2006), andalternating stops are underlyingly unspecified for voice (i.e. /taD/, /at/).191