TY - JOUR
T1 - Selectional restrictions as phonotactics over sublexicons
AU - Gouskova, Maria
AU - Newlin-Łukowicz, Luiza
AU - Kasyanenko, Sofya
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Adam Albright, Suzy Ahn, Michael Becker, Ryan Bennett, Stuart Davis, Kenneth de Jong, David Embick, Steven Franks, Gillian Gallagher, Stephanie Harves, Bruce Hayes, Junko Ito, Itamar Kastner, Jeremy Kuhn, Sang-Im Lee, Alec Marantz, Elliott Moreton, Neil Myler, Jaye Padgett, Katya Pertsova, Jen Smith, Jonathan North Washington, Colin Wilson, Matt Wolf, and audiences at NYU, UNC Chapel Hill, UPenn, UC Santa Cruz, the 22nd Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics conference in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2013 at UMass Amherst and 2014 at MIT. Thanks also to Anna Aristova for helping with participant recruitment, and to all of our Russian participants. Special thanks to the Associate Editor of Lingua and the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments have greatly improved the paper. Our work was supported in part by NSF grant BCS-1224652 .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2015/11/1
Y1 - 2015/11/1
N2 - Affixation and allomorphy are often phonologically predictable: thus, the English indefinite "a" appears before consonants, and "an" before vowels. We propose a theory of phonological selection that separates rules of morpheme realization from phonological knowledge about the bases and the derived words. This phonological knowledge is encoded in miniature phonotactic grammars, which are learned over sublexicons defined by morphological generalizations. Each sublexical phonotactic grammar determines the likelihood that a new word will follow the associated rule. We examine a complex case of suppletive allomorphy in Russian, whose diminutive suffixes define sublexicons differing in constraints on final consonant place and manner, presence and location of consonant clusters, vowel hiatus, and stress. In elicitation, Russians choose allomorphs for words without diminutives based on how these words and the derived diminutives fare in the sublexical phonotactic grammars. In a nonce word study, Russians also chose allomorphs based on sublexical phonotactic well-formedness, even when the phonotactic violations were non-local to the affix itself. These patterns are missed by alternative approaches such as emergence of the unmarked, insertion rules that refer directly to phonological information, and the Minimal Generalization Learner.
AB - Affixation and allomorphy are often phonologically predictable: thus, the English indefinite "a" appears before consonants, and "an" before vowels. We propose a theory of phonological selection that separates rules of morpheme realization from phonological knowledge about the bases and the derived words. This phonological knowledge is encoded in miniature phonotactic grammars, which are learned over sublexicons defined by morphological generalizations. Each sublexical phonotactic grammar determines the likelihood that a new word will follow the associated rule. We examine a complex case of suppletive allomorphy in Russian, whose diminutive suffixes define sublexicons differing in constraints on final consonant place and manner, presence and location of consonant clusters, vowel hiatus, and stress. In elicitation, Russians choose allomorphs for words without diminutives based on how these words and the derived diminutives fare in the sublexical phonotactic grammars. In a nonce word study, Russians also chose allomorphs based on sublexical phonotactic well-formedness, even when the phonotactic violations were non-local to the affix itself. These patterns are missed by alternative approaches such as emergence of the unmarked, insertion rules that refer directly to phonological information, and the Minimal Generalization Learner.
KW - Diminutives
KW - Morphology
KW - Phonology
KW - Russian
KW - Selectional restrictions
KW - Suppletion
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U2 - 10.1016/j.lingua.2015.08.014
DO - 10.1016/j.lingua.2015.08.014
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84946725114
SN - 0024-3841
VL - 167
SP - 41
EP - 81
JO - Lingua
JF - Lingua
ER -