Dissertation - Michael Becker

In the UR-based analysis, the grammar is consistent for all the words of the language(i.e. IDENT(voice) ≫ *VtV), and therefore the learner is left without a way to build lexicalstatistics into their grammar.In principle, speakers can find the relevant lexical statistics by going directly to thelexicon and extracting the relevant information from it, as is practiced in AnalogicalModeling of Language (AML, Skousen 1989, 1993) and in Spread Activation models(Schreuder & Baayen 1995; Krott et al. 2001). When going to the lexicon directly, however,the speaker will not be biased by UG to find only grammatically-principled generalizations.Any kind of regularity in the lexicon could be discovered and projected onto novel items,contrary to fact: In the Turkish lexicon, there is a trend for more voicing alternations afterhigh vowels than after low vowels, yet speakers show no sign of having learned this trend.Since cross-linguistically, vowel height cannot affect the voicing of a following stop, thisis the expected result. To learn all and only the phonologically plausible generalizationsabout their lexicon, language speakers must encode these generalizations in their grammar,where they can benefit from the biases imposed by UG.Assuming the base form of a noun as its underlying representation means that anyadditional aspects of the noun’s behavior that are not directly observable in the base formwill have to be attributed to other aspects of the linguistic system. Given the standardOT framework that uses underlying representations of roots and affixes and a constraintranking, if hidden properties of roots are blocked from being attributed to those roots,hidden properties can only be attributed to the underlying representations of affixes or to thegrammar. In the Turkish case, the difference between at and tat could logically be attributedto the allomorph of the possessive suffix that they take: at would take a simple high vowel,while tat would take an affix that consists of a high vowel and a floating [+voice] feature,as in (182).(182) a. The UR’s of [at] and [tat] are /at/ and /tat/b. The possessive has two allomorphs: /I/ and /[+voice] I/194