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.
Descriptors: Grammar, Navajo, Morphemes, Language Research, Probability, English, Phonology, Suprasegmentals, Morphology (Languages), Generalization
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