A current controversy in phonological theory concerns the explanation of crosslinguistic tendencies. It is often assumed that crosslinguistic tendencies are explained by mental bias: a pattern is common because it is favored by learners/speakers. But work by Blevins and colleagues in Evolutionary Phonology has argued that many crosslinguistic tendencies can be explained without positing such bias. This would mean that crosslinguistic tendencies cannot be unproblematically used as evidence about the mental machinery that humans bring to learning and using language. In response, many researchers have looked at different types of data, such as processing, learning of real and artificial languages, and literary invention. This paper presents another type of data: extension of native-language phonology to words with novel phonological structure, in this case infixation in Tagalog into loanwords with novel initial consonant clusters. The data come from a written corpus and a survey. Tagalog speakers' treatment of these clusters parallels crosslinguistic findings of cluster splittability by Fleischhacker. This paper argues that explaining the data requires attributing to Tagalog speakers phonetic knowledge and a bias about how to apply that knowledge. * * Many people besides the author have put substantial work into this paper. For detailed critiques of every aspect of the paper, I'm indebted to Brian Joseph, Jaye Padgett, Donca Steriade, and two anonymous reviewers. This project was prompted by and draws heavily on the research of Heidi Fleischhacker MacBride. Essential to the creation of the corpus used in this paper were programming work by Ivan Tam; a grant from the UCLA Faculty Senate; and earlier work by Rayid Ghani, Rosie Jones, and Dunja Mladenic, who generously shared their corpus. For 3 discussions and suggestions on various components of the project, I thank Adam Albright,

Intersecting constraint families: an argument for Harmonic Grammar * We would like to thank Andy Lin of UCLA's statistical consulting group for help without which the project would not have been feasible. Giorgio Magri kindly formulated and proved the theorem we use in §3.8.1. We also thank for their helpful advice Arto Anttila and Paul Smolensky, as well as audiences at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (Santa Cruz), the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (Cornell), the

This paper presents a case of patterned exceptionality. The case is Tagalog nasal substitution, a phenomenon in which a prefix-final nasal fuses with a steminitial obstruent. The rule is variable on a word-by-word basis, but its distribution is phonologically patterned, as shown through dictionary and corpus data. Speakers appear to have implicit knowledge of the patterning, as shown through experimental data and loan adaptation. A grammar is proposed that reconciles the primacy of lexical information with regularities in the distribution of the rule. Morphologically complex words are allowed to have their own lexical entries, whose use is preferred to on-the-fly morphological concatenation. The grammar contains lowerranked markedness constraints that govern the behavior of novel words. Faithfulness for lexicalized full words is ranked high, so that an established word will have a stable pronunciation. But when a word is newly coined through affixation, the outcome varies according the lexical trends. A crucial aspect of the proposal is that the ranking of the "subterranean" markedness constraints can be learned despite training data in which all words are pronounced faithfully, using Boersma's (1997Boersma's ( , 1998 Gradual learning algorithm. The paper also shows, by summarizing the rule's behavior in related languages, that the same constraints, in different rankings, seem to be at work even in languages reported to lack variation.

I propose that there is a purely phonological drive to impose a reduplication-like structure (‘coupling’) on words. This structure can lead to enhancement or preservation of word-internal self-similarity. The case of vowel raising in Tagalog loan-stems is examined in detail. Raising can be blocked in order to preserve similarity between the stem penult and the stem ultima. The more similar the penult and ultima along various dimensions, the more likely coupling is, and thus the more likely resistance to raising. I attribute phonologically driven coupling to the activity of a constraint REDUP in generation, which shapes the way new words are lexicalised in the vowel-raising case, but also consider an alternative source for reduplicative construals (the effect of *SPEC in lexical learning). The proposal is compared to others that promote correspondence between similar or identical single segments within a word; I conclude that a relation between strings is necessary.

Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified according to whether they are natural (founded in principles of Universal Grammar (UG)) or unnatural (arbitrary, learned inductively from the language data). Recent work has used this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role of UG in learning. Some languages have phonological patterns that arguably reflect unnatural constraints. With experimental testing, one can assess whether such patterns are actually learned by native speakers. Becker, Ketrez, and Nevins (2007), testing speakers of Turkish, suggest that they do indeed go unlearned. They interpret this result with a strong UG position: humans are unable to learn data patterns not backed by UG principles.