Dissertation - Michael Becker

In the approach that attributes hidden structure to the grammar, roots are not required tobehave uniformly with different affixes. There is a bias, however, for assigning consistentbehavior to roots, as discussed in §4.3.4. In Turkish, for instance, once a root is observedto alternate in the possessive, the grammar will record this fact by connecting three pieces:the root, the possessive affix, and a conflict between constraints. When the speaker wishesto generate the same root with a different suffix, say the accusative, and the same constraintconflict is involved, the root’s possessive entry will match the root in the accusative, andbias the speaker to assign the same behavior to the root with both affixes.4.4.4 Hidden structure in roots: EnglishIn the various lexical trends that were discusses in this chapter, it was always the casethat a relatively simple concatenation of a root and affix, together with some lexicallyspecificrankings, allowed the speaker to map one form onto a morphologically relatedform. Quite clearly, this is not always the case.Extreme examples of phonologicallyintractable mappings are usually described as suppletion, like the English go ∼ went. Incases like these, the learner has no choice but to store the form went as an unanalyzedwhole, and nothing about this form becomes available to the grammar of the past tense.Other cases might not be as clear as go ∼ went. The English past tense includes sevenverbs that end in [Ot]: teach ∼ taught, catch ∼ caught, think ∼ thought, bring ∼ brought,seek ∼ sought, fight ∼ fought, and buy ∼ bought. Can these verbs be mapped onto theirpast tense using phonological machinery?While mapping a verb like [faIt] to [fOt] is relatively faithful, involving only thereplacement of the vowel, verbs like [brIN] and [sik] keep nothing but their onset in the past.One can imagine that for those verbs, an allomorph of the past tense suffix that consists ofa pair of floating segments, / Ot /, can dock correctly and replace the root segments. In suchan analysis, MAX(float) would ensure that both segments dock at the cost of faithfulness tothe root.206