A model of lexical variation and the grammar with application to Tagalog nasal substitution

Abstract

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.

Accent classes in South Kyengsang Korean: Lexical drift, novel words and loanwords

“…From this they conclude that the acquisition of UG-motivated sound patterns has an analytic advantage compared to less natural ones. Zuraw (2000Zuraw ( , 2010 found a similar effect in Tagalog. In the native lexicon, the nasal substitution alternation at the prefix-stem boundary applies with greater frequency and reliability to stems beginning with a voiceless stop compared to the corresponding voiced one: e.g.…”

“…H-J. Kim (2012) attributed both the novel word results and the loanword accent to the action of UG constraints trained on the statistics of the lexicon, employing the USE LISTED model of Zuraw (2000Zuraw ( , 2010. In the final section of the paper, we questioned the suitability of this model for our South Kyengsang data.…”

“…Zuraw (2000Zuraw ( , 2010 inaugurated this line of inquiry with the finding that variations in the rate of NC cluster reduction in Tagalog nonce words and loanwords mirrored the distribution of these factors in the lexicon. This result was explained by the hypothesis that the strength of the markedness constraints controlling the reduction was based on the statistical distribution of the competing data structures in the lexicon, but that faithfulness constraints to a lexically listed structure prevented any particular word from straying from its actual output.…”

“…H-J. Kim (2012), inspired by the research mentioned above, in particular Zuraw (2000Zuraw ( , 2010, suggests that UG plays little role here. Rather, the Kyengsang speaker assigns accent based on the action of UG markedness constraints, whose weights are determined by the frequency of the accent patterns in the native Kyengsang lexicon.…”

Speakers’ knowledge of alternations is asymmetrical: Evidence from Seoul Korean verb paradigms

“…However, lexical encoding/listing alone is not sufficient to explain speakers' knowledge of unpredictable alternations, since such processes often show some degree of productivity. Productivity shows that speakers have extrapolated knowledge that goes beyond the specific stems involved; speakers must also have grammatical rules or constraint rankings for exceptionful or irregular processes (Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1977;Zuraw 2000Zuraw , 2010Albright & Hayes 2003;Hayes & Londe 2006;Pater et al 2012). Furthermore, it has been observed that in many cases, the productivity of an alternation reflects the relative frequency of that pattern in the lexicon.…”