Dissertation - Michael Becker

assume that the learner takes the bare noun to be the underlying representation, a move thatI discuss and motivate in §4.4.In Turkish, the proportion of t-final nouns that exhibit the voicing alternation is lowrelative to the proportion of Ù -final nouns that exhibit the voicing alternation. Speakers areaware of the this difference, and when they are given novel t-final and Ù -final nouns and areasked to add the possessive suffix, they choose voicing alternations more often with Ù -finalnouns than with t-final nouns. This replication of the relative strength of lexical trends innovel nouns is by no means restricted to Turkish, and it has been observed in a variety oflanguages, e.g. Tagalog (Zuraw 2000), Dutch (Ernestus & Baayen 2003), and many others.The table in (11) shows counts of t-final and Ù -final monosyllabic nouns in the TurkishElectronic Living Lexicon (TELL, Inkelas et al. 2000). The crucial point to notice hereis that the 18 t-final nouns that alternate are more numerous than the 15 Ù -final nounsthat alternate, yet the alternating t-final nouns make only 15% of the total t-final nouns,relative to the larger 37% alternation rate among the Ù -final nouns. So while t-final nounsshow more alternation in absolute numbers, they show a smaller proportion of alternation.Since speakers prefer alternating [Ù] to alternating [t], one can conclude that what speakersare attending to is not the number of alternating nouns for a given segment, but ratherthe number of alternating nouns relative to the number of non-alternating nouns for thatsegment.(11) alternating non-alternating % alternatingt 18 102 15%Ù 15 26 37%It should also be pointed out that speakers must be able to keep track of alternationrates for [t] separately from [Ù], rather than simply compute a single, global rate ofalternations for all consonants. To achieve this result, speakers must come with a preexistingpropensity to keep track of the behavior of different segments separately, since13