Dissertation - Michael Becker

Both ways of dealing with [sOt] – cloning MAX(float) or storing it as a whole – areequally bad for finding out what kind of roots are Ot-takers.Indeed, English speakersare reluctant to generalize Ot-taking, or to do so in any phonologically principled way.In other words, the speaker doesn’t necessarily always have to decide whether a certainpattern is suppletive or not. They may treat what’s essentially a suppletive pattern withtheir grammatical machinery, but if the grammar tells them nothing about the shape of therelevant lexical items (e.g. due to the lack of involvement of markedness constraints, as in(197)), then no damage is done, since the pattern cannot be extended usefully.4.4.5 The naturalness of lexical trends: DutchDutch exhibits voicing alternations between bare roots (which in the case of verbs canbe heard in the imperative) and affixed forms, as in (198). In the lexicon, the proportion ofalternating consonants depends on the identity of the consonant, and speakers project theseproportions unto novel items, as shown by Ernestus & Baayen (2003). The phonologyof Dutch raises two questions that relate to the naturalness of lexical trends: (a) theissue of natural relationships between lexical trends, and (b) the functional grounding, ornaturalness of each lexical trend.(198) Imperative Infinitive Past tensetOp tOb-@n tOb-d@ ‘worry’stOp stOp-@n stOp-t@ ‘stop’Ernestus & Baayen (2003) report that in the lexicon, the proportion of alternating labialstops is smaller than the proportion of alternating coronal stops, and speakers replicatethis preference in their treatment of novel words. In the model I propose, Dutch speakerswill clone IDENT(voice) relative to constraints on voiced codas, 17 and collect the stop-final17 In Ernestus & Baayen (2003), speakers’ knowledge was tested with novel past tense forms, where thestem-final stop is in coda position. In the infinitive, and before other vowel-initial suffixes, the stem-final stop208