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ERIC Number: EJ960806
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Dec
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0097-8507
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Grammars Leak: Modeling How Phonotactic Generalizations Interact within the Grammar
Martin, Andrew
Language, v87 n4 p751-770 Dec 2011
I present evidence from Navajo and English that weaker, gradient versions of morpheme-internal phonotactic constraints, such as the ban on geminate consonants in English, hold even across prosodic word boundaries. I argue that these lexical biases are the result of a MAXIMUM ENTROPY phonotactic learning algorithm that maximizes the probability of the learning data, but that also contains a smoothing term that penalizes complex grammars. When this learner attempts to construct a grammar in which some constraints are blind to morphological structure, it underpredicts the frequency of compounds that violate a morpheme-internal phonotactic. I further show how, over time, this learning bias could plausibly lead to the lexical biases seen in Navajo and English.
Linguistic Society of America. 1325 18th Street NW Suite 211, Washington, DC 20036. Tel: 202-835-1714; Fax: 202-835-1717; Web site: http://www.lsadc.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A