Dissertation - Michael Becker

1.2 Structure of the dissertationAfter the introduction to lexical trends and their treatment in OT using constraintcloning, two case studies are presented.The first case study is Turkish voicing alternations, discussed in chapter 2. It presentsa study of the Turkish lexicon, and compares it to results from a novel word taskexperiment, showing that speakers projects lexical statistics onto novel items. Speakersuse the size of words (mono- vs. poly-syllabic) and the identity of their final stop todefine classes of similar lexical items, and project the behavior of each class onto novelitems. Speakers do not use, however, the quality of the word-final vowel in calculatingthis similarity. I relate this language-specific observation to the cross-linguistic observationabout speakers’ reluctance to learn a relationship between vowel quality and the voicingof a neighboring consonant (Moreton 2008). The connection between language-specificlexical trends and cross-linguistic typological observations is formalized by deriving bothkinds of phenomena from a single inventory of universal constraints, CON. The use ofCON to express lexical trends means that only trends that can be expressed in terms ofuniversal constraints can be learned. In other words, speakers use universal considerationswhen they assess the similarity of lexical items.The second case study is Hebrew plural allomorphy, discussed in chapter 3. Again, alexicon study is compared with results from a novel word task experiment, showing thatspeakers project a trend from their lexicon onto novel words. When choosing a plural suffixfor masculine nouns, –im is chosen in the majority of cases, but the presence of an [o] inthe stem significantly boosts the likelihood of choosing the plural allomorph –ot. In realHebrew, every plural noun that has an [o] in its stem also has an [o] in the singular, so inreal Hebrew, the connection between the presence of the [o] in the stem and the selectionof the suffix –ot can be stated equally well over the singulars, the plurals, or the mappingbetween singulars and plurals. In an artificial mapping experiment, Hebrew speakers wereasked to learn novel vowel mappings between singular and plural stems that put [o] only in17