Past Event

Constraint Scaling Factors and Patterns of Variation in Phonology

Language systems characterized by high levels of variability offer unique possibilities for probing the structure of the phonological grammar. This talk examines data from developing L1 phonologies and loanword adaptation patterns, and argues that scaling of constraint values within a system of weighted constraints offers the most direct means of encoding the attested effects.

Two case studies are presented. The first case study looks at words that contain multiple sources of syllable-structure markedness, focusing on data from the twelve Dutch- acquiring children in the CLPF corpus (Fikkert 1994, Levelt 1994). The overall finding is that accurate realization of marked coda structures increases the probability that marked onset structures will be accurately realized by the child. These effects cannot be reduced to either age or the frequency with which the marked structures are attempted. The second case study examines the realization of marginal segments in a corpus of Québec French borrowings from English (Roy 1992), and finds evidence for similar interactions at the level of segmental realization. Given that one marked structure is realized accurately, the probability increases that other marked structures will also be realized accurately. Other loanword data show related implicational patterns.

I argue these interactions are best modeled through scaling of constraint values within a probabilistic weighted constraint grammar – either Noisy Harmonic Grammar (Boersma & Pater 2008) or Maximum Entropy OT (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). Constraint scaling factors co-exist with basic constraints weights, and can be keyed both to grammatical factors like prosodic position, and to non-phonological factors like word frequency and attention. The result is a model that captures the attested interactions between marked structures within words while avoiding the pitfalls of previous accounts that are too restrictive to accurately model the full range of variation.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies.