Speaker: Daniar Kasenov (NYU)
Title: Nonce word wellformedness and abstract URs: the case of Russian yers
Time: Thursday, November 13th, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: Nonce word studies are part of the toolbox to probe productivity, especially of non-automatic phonological alternations, such as Russian vowel-zero alternations (Russian yers). Existing work (Gouskova, Becker 2013; Becker, Gouskova 2016) shows that Russian speakers extend phonotactic tendencies regarding which words do and do not undergo the alternations to nonce items. Becker and Gouskova argue that the results support Gouskova’s (2012) diacritic-based account of Russian yers against approaches that rely on abstract contrasts between vowels. In this talk, I wish to explore how a proponent of the abstract UR approach might account for Becker and Gouskova’s results without ignoring the experimental results altogether. I present preliminary results that a simple bigram model over URs and SRs might do the trick (cf. Scheer’s 2019 argument that the effects reported by Becker and Gouskova are “lexical”).