Dissertation - Michael Becker

the singular or only in the plural. The speakers showed a preference for selecting the pluralaffix based on the vowel present in the plural stem. This preference doesn’t come from realHebrew, and I propose that it comes from universal grammar. I formalize this preferencewith the use of markedness constraints, which only assess output forms, in this case, pluralforms.With the support gathered in chapters 2 and 3 for the use of Optimality Theory toaccount for lexical trends, a formal theory is developed in chapter 4. I offer an extensionof the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm (RCD, Tesar & Smolensky 1998, 2000;Tesar 1998; Prince 2002) with constraint cloning (Pater 2006, 2008b) that learns a grammarfrom language data that includes lexically-specific phonological processes. This chapteralso offers a discussion of the revised assumptions about underlying representations in thismodel, specifically, the restriction of non-surface-true underlying representations to affixes,leaving roots necessarily surface-true underlyingly. Finally, the typology of lexical trendsthat the model predicts is examined.18