Dissertation - Michael Becker

RCD takes winner-loser pairs such as the one in (36) and extracts a grammar from themby identifying columns that don’t have L’s in them and “installing” them. In this simplecase, MAX can be installed, meaning that it is added to the grammar below any otherpreviously installed constraints (which would be at the top of the grammar in this case,since no constraints were previously installed), and winner-loser pairs that MAX assigns aW to are removed from the tableau. Once MAX is thus installed, the tableau is emptiedout, and the remaining constraints, in this case just *CODA, are added at the bottom ofthe grammar. The resulting grammar is now MAX ≫ *CODA, which allows codas to beproduced, as in adult Turkish.There is no guarantee, however, that RCD will always be able to install any constraintsand remove all of the winner-loser pairs from the tableau. If all of the available columnshave L’s in them, RCD will stall. This situation arises when the language provides thelearner with conflicting data, as in (37). In some words, a stem-final stop is voicelessthroughout the paradigm (37a-b), and in others, a final stop shows up voiceless in the barestem and voiced in the possessive (37c-d).(37) bare stem possessivea. aÙ aÙ-1 ‘hunger’b. anaÙ anaÙ-1 ‘female cub’c. taÙ taÃ-1 ‘crown’d. amaÙ amaÃ-1 ‘target’Assuming the bare stem with its voiceless stop as the underlying form, 7the nonalternatingforms rank faithfulness to the underlying representations above the markedness7 Assuming the bare stem as the underlying representation goes against the tradition in generativelinguistic theory, which assumes that alternating stops and non-alternarting stops have different specificationsfor voice underlyingly (Inkelas & Orgun 1995; Inkelas et al. 1997, yet cf. Hayes 1995b). The empiricalshortcomings of the traditional approach are addressed in §2.6.44