Dissertation - Michael Becker

Since the deleting dorsals and the voicing dorsals are in complementary distribution,and controlled by separate constraints, it doesn’t matter which trend leads to cloning first.2.4.7 Summary of the analysisThis section offered an OT-based model that allows speakers to detect inconsistentbehavior in their lexicon, and encode the inconsistency in terms of lexically-specificconstraint clones. Each cloned constraint lists the items that it applies to, with each itemlisted with the constraint that triggered the inconsistency. This lexically-enriched grammarcan be applied to novel items, with clones that list more items more likely to exert theirinfluence, thus projecting the lexical trend unto the novel items.The listing of lexical items with clones can also be seen as partitioning the lexicon:Each item is classified according to its behavior, getting listed with an appropriate clone ifit participates in a lexical trend, or going unlisted if it isn’t.In Turkish, voicing alternations are irregular. Stem-final voiceless stops become voicedbefore vowel-initial suffixes in some words due to markedness constraints that favorlenition, and stay voiceless in other words due to faithfulness to their base form, whichis also assumed to be their underlying form. The availability of a family of markednessconstraints that affect each place of articulation separately, (viz. *VpV, *VtV, *VÙV,*VkV) allows speakers to partition the stop-final nouns of Turkish according to the placeof articulation of the final stop.With access to the relative number of items in eachpartition of the lexicon, speakers can project this aspect of the lexical statistics onto novelforms. The availability of faithfulness constraints that are specific to initial syllables (viz.IDENT(voice) σ1 and MAX σ1 ) and general faithfulness constraints allows speaker to partitionthe stop-final nouns of Turkish according to their size: Alternations in mono-syllabic nounscan be identified as causing unfaithfulness to the only, and hence to the initial syllable ofthe base, whereas alternations in longer nouns do not affect the initial syllable. This lets64