Deriving Variation from Grammar

Anttila, Artο

doi:10.1075/cilt.146.04ant

Cited by 378 publications

(108 citation statements)

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“…In generative phonology, underlying lexical items may be changed by phonological derivation, which begins with the application of lexical phonological rules, followed by the application of post-lexical phonological rules (Kiparsky, 1982(Kiparsky, , 1985(Kiparsky, , 1993Anttila, 1997). Coetzee & Pater (2011) used the more neutral terms of early and late phonology to avoid characterizing the distinction between different levels of the phonological grammar in a too theory-specific way.…”

Section: Variation In Phonologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nature of Variation in Tone Sandhi Patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu

Yan¹

2018

Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics

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The primary goal of this dissertation is to understand the variation patterns in suprasegmental processes and what factors influence the patterns. To answer the questions, we investigated the variation patterns of tone sandhi in the Shanghai and Wuxi Wu dialects of Chinese.Shanghai disyllables and trisyllables have been documented to have two different sandhi patterns: tonal extension and tonal reduction. Some items can only undergo tonal extension, some items can only undergo tonal reduction, and some can variably undergo either type of sandhi. Previous works have indicated that the syntactic structure, semantic transparency, and lexical frequency of the items all play a role in the sandhi application.Additionally, the morpheme length of trisyllabic items (1+2, 2+1) is also expected to affect their sandhi application.A variant forms' goodness rating experiment, together with a lexical frequency rating experiment and a semantic transparency rating experiment, showed that syntactic structure has a primary effect on sandhi application in general. It overrides the effect of semantic transparency, especially in modifier-noun items. The nature of the lexical frequency effect in Shanghai is related to the syntactic structure of the lexical item. Morpheme length effect is not found.Wuxi disyllables and trisyllables also have been observed to have two different sandhi patterns: tonal substitution and no sandhi. Some items can only apply tonal substitution, and some can apply either form variably. Syntactic structure and semantic transparency have been iv reported to affect Wuxi sandhi application, and morpheme length is also expected to have an effect in trisyllabic sandhi application.The three rating experiments conducted in Wuxi found that due to the lexical listedness of the opaque substitution pattern, frequency influences both modifier-noun and verb-noun positively, although modifier-noun prefers tonal substitution form more. Semantic transparency effect is only apparent for verb-noun disyllables. Moreover, morpheme length also distinguishes sandhi application between 1+2 and 2+1 modifier-noun items.In all, by using quantitative rating experiments, the present study shows that tone sandhi variation is regulated by both grammatical factors, such as syntactic structure, morpheme length, phonological opacity, and nongrammatical factors, such as lexical frequency.v

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Section: Variation In Phonologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nature of Variation in Tone Sandhi Patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu

Yan¹

2018

Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics

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“…These models have all been developed in some version of a constraint-based grammar, be that classic discrete Optimality Theory (OT) (Anttila 1997(Anttila , 2002a(Anttila , 2006(Anttila , 2007Anttila et al 2008;Bane to appear a, b;Coetzee 2004Coetzee , 2006Coetzee , 2009cKiparsky 1993;Reynolds 1994), stochastic OT (Boersma 1997;Boersma and Hayes 2001), or noisy Harmonic Grammar (HG) (Coetzee 2009a;Coetzee and Pater to appear;Jesney 2007) 1 .…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency biases in phonological variation

Coetzee

Kawahara

2012

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Abstract. In the past two decades, variation has received a lot of attention in mainstream generative phonology, and several different models have been developed to account for variable phonological phenomena. However, all existing generative models of phonological variation account for the overall rate at which some process applies in a corpus, and therefore implicitly assume that all words are affected equally by a variable process. In this paper, we show that this is not the case. Many variable phenomena are more likely to apply to frequent than infrequent words. A model that accounts perfectly for the overall rate of application of some variable process therefore does not necessarily account very well for the actual application of the process to individual words. We illustrate this with two examples, English t/d-deletion and Japanese geminate devoicing. We then augment one existing generative model (noisy Harmonic Grammar) to incorporate the contribution of usage frequency to the application of variable processes. In this model, the influence of frequency is incorporated by scaling the weights of faithfulness constraints up or down for words of different frequencies. This augmented model accounts significantly better for variation than existing generative models.

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“…Our claim is that there is: In English, the s-plural This avoids both construction-specific rules and unenlightening listing of allomorph environments and follows the OT analysis of allomorphy and lexical selection in many earlier studies, beginning with Mester 1994 for Latin (see Anttila 1997, Burzio 1994, Kager 1996, Mascaró 1996a, Perlmutter 1998, Russell 1995, Tranel 1996a. This leads to a TETU-effect for such listed pairs of allomorphs (Mascaró 1996b)--here, postnasal voicing in tandem with default voicelessness--in thoroughly foreign territory, where IDENT-F otherwise prevents any changes in voicing.…”

Section: Tetu Ii: Allomorphy and Faithfulness Neutralizationmentioning

confidence: 99%