Dissertation - Michael Becker

pattern is. Speakers use their grammar to estimate the relative likelihood of the variousbehaviors that the grammar allows, and use this estimate to decide the fate of novel itemsthey encounter.This section shows how constraint cloning can be used to extract therelative strength of an irregular pattern from the lexicon.In Turkish, stem-final voiceless stops become voiced when an affix (such as thepossessive) makes them intervocalic. This process applies to some words (10a), but notothers (10b).(10) bare noun possessivea. tat tad-1 ‘taste’taÙ taÃ-1 ‘crown’b. at at-1 ‘horse’aÙ aÙ-1 ‘hunger’The Turkish phenomenon is similar to the case of the English past tense: Differentwords of Turkish behave differently, and this difference can be captured in terms ofconstraint rankings.In Turkish, the relevant markedness constraints are those againstintervocalic voiceless stops, such as *VtV and *VÙV 4 . In words like the ones in (10a),*VtV and *VÙV outrank faithfulness to voicing, causing a voiceless stop to become voiced.In words like the ones in (10b), faithfulness outranks *VtV and *VÙV, leaving the stemunchanged in the suffixed form. Note that faithfulness to voicing is violated in (10a) onlyif the stem-final stop is taken to be underlyingly voiceless, as it is in the bare noun. I will4 *VtV and *VÙV are not generally active in Turkish, and voiceless intervocalic stops occur freely inroots, e.g. ata ‘father’, paÙa ‘trotter’. The effect of *VtV and *VÙV must be limited in Turkish to derivedenvironments, i.e. they must only affect stops that have become intervocalic under affixation. While thisrestriction could in principle be built into the definition of the constraints, e.g. *Vt]V, where the square bracketnotes a morpheme boundary, a more attractive solution is offered in Wolf (2008b), who shows that principlesof OT-CC (McCarthy 2007a) can be used to account for derived environment effects without hard-wiringthese effects into the definition of the constraints.12