Speaker: Adam Albright
Title: Cumulative complexity effects and phonotactic acceptability
Time: Monday, 3/15, 5pm
Location: 32-D831
A design feature of both ruled-based and constraint-based models of phonology is that processes apply independently of one another: for example, final consonant clusters with disagreeing voicing are always banned in English, causing voicing alternations regardless of whether the word has a simple or complex onset (`caps’ /kæp+z/, `claps’ /klæp+z/ ? [kæps], [klæps]), a round vowel (`copes’ /ko?p+z/ ? [ko?ps]), or any other marked structure. By forcing rules or constraints to apply independently, we exclude the possibility of `superadditive’ effects in which the well-formedness of a structure depends on the presence of another structure. In this talk, I argue that when we move beyond alternations and turn to static phonotactics, superadditive effects do seem to occur. For example, English allows words beginning with /bl-/ and /gl-/ clusters, as well as words ending in /-sp/ and /-sk/ clusters, but there are no words with both together (*blesk, *glisp). As it turns out, the rarity or lack of such combinations cannot be predicted from the independent frequencies of /bl-/, /-sp/, etc. I discuss several sources of evidence for superadditive effects, including lexical underattestation in Lakhota and English, and acceptability ratings for English nonce words. In all three cases, it appears that marginal structures become worse in the presence of other marginal structures. Crucially, however, not all combinations are penalized in this way. Relatively common combinations, such as /kr-/ and /-st/ co-occur about as often as expected (crust, crest, etc.), and do not show superadditive effects. Furthermore, although frequency is often a factor in predicting superadditive effects, in many cases, phonetic biases appear to play an even more important role in determining the marginality of a structure. I propose a model in which acceptability judgments arise through a combination of two levels of evaluation: (1) a non-grammatical evaluation of phonotactic probability, which assesses the joint probability of the substrings in a word, and (2) evaluation by a grammar of weighted constraints, further penalizing sequences that violate highly weighted constraints.
Upcoming talks:
- Mar 29 Youngah Do
- Apr 5 Mafuhu Kitahara (Waseda University)
- Apr 12 Haruka Fukazawa (Keio University)
- Apr 26 Jae Yung Song (Brown University)
- May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
- May 10 Donca Steriade
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