Dissertation - Michael Becker

fact, unbounded at the phrasal level, and that the space can be limited by language-specificlearning of the word-level phonology and by universal expectations about the range ofphenomena that are accessible to the phrasal phonology.5.2.3 Issues in lexical organizationThe phonological analyses offered in this work incorporate a great deal of lexicalinformation into the Optimality Theoretic grammar, in the form of constraint clones thatare associated with lists of stems. One wonders, then, what is the full range of interactionsthat should be admitted between lexical items and the grammar, and how these are learned.Widely used and essentially uncontroversial are constraints that refer to lexical classessuch as nouns (see Smith 2001 for a review). The need for affix-specific grammars has alsobeen widely recognized in the literature, starting with the analysis of Tagalog infixation interms of affix-specific alignment constraints (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy2003), and expanding to other domains of prosodic morphology, as in, e.g. Flack (2007b),Gouskova (2007), and §4.5.3 above. In these cases, the grammar is enriched with referenceto morphological categories such as “noun” or “benefactive” that are needed elsewhere inthe grammar, and are thus not assumed to add much of a burden to the learner. However, aformal mechanism for learning these constraint indexations is yet to be proposed.Making a connection between the grammar and an arbitrary list of lexical items,however, has also been proposed under the name of lexical stratification (Itô & Mester1995, 1999, 2003; Kawahara et al. 2003; Féry 2003; Becker 2003; Gelbart 2005; Rice2006; Jurgec 2009, among others). The association of grammars with arbitrarily definedlists of items is conceptually akin to the treatment of lexical exceptions offered in thisdissertation, and perhaps these two areas of phonology should be handled with the sametheoretical machinery.Much of the work on lexical stratification is interested in theclustering of phonological properties, such as the characterization of Yamato Japaneseby several different phonotactic restrictions, whereas lexical exceptions as defined in this226