Dissertation - Michael Becker

CHAPTER 3SURFACE-BASED LEXICAL TRENDS IN HEBREW3.1 IntroductionIn Hebrew, the plural suffix for nouns has two allomorphs: –im for masculine nounsand –ot for feminine nouns. The choice of affix is completely predictable for adjectivesand loanwords, but native nouns allow exceptions both ways: some masculine nouns take–ot, and some feminine nouns take –im.The masculine nouns that exceptionally take –ot are phonologically clustered. Out ofthe 230 ot-takers in a Hebrew lexicon (Bolozky & Becker 2006), 146 nouns, or 63%, havethe vowel [o] in their last syllable. The results reported in §3.3 below and in Berent, Pinker& Shimron (2002, 1999) show that speakers are aware of the trend for more –ot in nounsthat end in [o], and project this trend onto novel items. In other words, speakers’ choiceof plural allomorph is not determined entirely by the stem’s gender or morphologicallyidiosyncratic properties, but also by the stem’s phonological shape.In my analysis of this case of partially phonologically determined allomorph selection,ot-takers with [o] in them respond to a high-ranking markedness constraint that requiresan unstressed [o] to be licensed by an adjacent stressed [o] (cf. similar requirement onvowel licensing in Shona, Beckman 1997; Hayes & Wilson 2008).Markedness-basedaccounts of allomorph selection in OT are common in the literature, starting with Mester(1994) and continuing with Mascaró (1996), Kager (1996), Anttila (1997), and Hargus(1997), among many others. More recent work includes Paster (2006), Wolf (2008b), andTrommer (2008). Since the analysis crucially relies on the use of markedness constraints,i.e. constraints that assess output forms, regardless of the posited underlying representation,74