Dissertation - Michael Becker

It might be worth noting that the distribution of the Turkish aorist is irregular only inthose cases where one sonorant from the aorist suffix and one sonorant from the root flanka vowel. In other words, the irregular pattern is not phonologically arbitrary. My UGbasedanalysis expresses this non-accidental nature of the distribution by the use of themarkedness constraint *RER.The Turkish case is parallel to the analysis of the English verbs offered above, whichcrucially relies on the fact that the past tense consists of an alveolar stop and that the verbsthat exceptionally don’t take it end in an alveolar stop. The distribution of the lexicalexceptions is not phonologically arbitrary, but rather follows from a constraint againstclusters of alveolar stops.4.6 ConclusionsThis chapter presents a theory of speakers’ knowledge of irregular morphology. I claimthat speakers use an Optimality Theoretic grammar to identify irregular patterns in theirlexicon and extract partial phonological regularities from it.The theory relies on theRecursive Constraint Demotion algorithm (Tesar & Smolensky 1998, 2000; Tesar 1998;Prince 2002), augmented with a mechanism of constraint cloning (Pater 2006, 2008b).Once it is discovered that different lexical items require different constraint rankings,a constraint is cloned, and each clone lists lexical items with it. As the speaker learnsthe words of their language, lexical statistics are gradually built into the grammar. Theresulting grammar is able to give consistent behavior to listed items, and also project thetrend that is created by the listed items stochastically onto novel items.I offer a formal theory of cloning, which involves the “least populated column” metricfor identifying constraints to clone, augmented with “masking”, which is a measure forpreventing double-dipping, ensuring that lexical trends are represented correctly in thegrammar.I formalize the learning algorithm as a variant of RCD with error-drivenlearning, including a method for finding underlying representations.In order to make218