Dissertation - Michael Becker

of voicing alternations in the lexicon, yet speakers ignore the effects of vowel height andbackness.This behavior is tied to the absence of regular effects of vowel quality onobstruent voicing cross-linguistically, arguing for a model that derives regular phonologyand irregular phonology from the same universal set of OT constraints.Chapter 3 presents a study of Hebrew allomorph selection, where there is a trend forpreferring the plural suffix [-ot] with stems that have [o] in them, which is analyzed as amarkedness pressure. The analysis of the trend in terms of markedness, i.e. constraints onoutput forms, predicts that speakers look to the plural stem vowel in their choice of theplural suffix, and ignore the singular stem. Since real Hebrew stems that have [o] in theplural also have [o] in the singular, Hebrew speakers were taught artificial languages thatpaired the suffix [-ot] with stems that have [o] only in the singular or only in the plural. Aspredicted, speakers preferred the pairing of [-ot] with stems that have [o] in the plural, i.e.speakers prefer the surface-based, output-oriented generalization.Chapter 4 develops the formal theory of cloning and its general application to lexicaltrends, and explores its fit with the typologically available data. One necessary aspect ofthe theory is the “inside out” analysis of paradigms (Hayes 1999), where the underlyingrepresentations of roots are always taken to be identical to their surface base form, andabstract underlying representations are limited to affixes. An algorithm for learning theproposed underlying representations is presented in a general form and is applied to a rangeof test cases.ix