Phonotactic restrictions and morphology in Aymara

Abstract

Nonlocal phonological interactions are often sensitive to morphological domains. Bolivian Aymara restricts the cooccurrence of plain, ejective, and aspirated stops within, but not across, morphemes. We document these restrictions in a morphologically parsed corpus of Aymara. We further present two experiments with native Aymara speakers. In the first experiment, speakers are asked to repeat nonce words that should be interpreted as monomorphemic. Speakers are more accurate at repeating nonce words that respect the nonlocal phonotactic restrictions than nonce words that violate them. In a second experiment, some nonce words are interpetable as morphologically complex, while others suggest a monomorphemic parse. Speakers show a sensitivity to this difference, and repeat the words more accurately when they can be interpreted as having a morpheme boundary between two consonants that tend to not cooccur inside a morpheme. Finally, we develop a computational model that induces nonlocal representations from the baseline grammar. The model posits projections when it notices that certain segments often cooccur when separated by a morpheme boundary. The model generates a full Maximum Entropy phonotactic grammar, which makes distinctions between attested and rare/unattested sequences in a way that aligns with the speaker behavior.

A MaxEnt learner for super-additive counting cumulativity

“…The constraint *+TT should be weighted highly enough to capture the clear OCP effect in W B while *T+T should be weighted lowly enough to allow two marked consonants to still co-occur over a word boundary. The OCP pattern of Korean compound tensification corroborates the observation that some phonological restrictions that hold within a morpheme can be loosened or even lifted at morpheme boundaries (Martin 2011;Gallagher et al 2019).…”

Strident harmony from the perspective of an inductive learner

“…Speakers, however, may have a strong harmony preference (or not), which is presumably learned from a morphologically informed analysis of the data. In languages where harmony holds only of roots or stems, a phonotactic learner may be more successful if morpheme boundaries are represented in the learning data (e.g., the simulation of a root-bound laryngeal restriction in Aymara in Gallagher et al 2019). Morpheme-specific alternations require a model of morphophonological learning (e.g., Albright & Hayes (2003) Gouskova & Becker (2013), Allen & Becker (2015)), that may represent knowledge of alternations as distinct from phonotactics.…”

“…The Inductive Projection Learner (Gouskova & Gallagher 2020;Gallagher et al 2019) builds on the UCLA Phonotactic Learner (Hayes & Wilson 2008), implementing an inductive procedure for postulating nonlocal projections. 1 The UCLA Phonotactic Learner takes as input a list of attested word forms in a language (the training data) and a feature set that uniquely defines each segment in the list.…”

“…I investigate the learnability of strident harmony through a quantitative assessment of strident cooccurrence in dictionary and web corpora for three languages from three different regions and families -Nkore-Kiga (Bantu), Papantla Totonac (Totonacan) and Navajo (Na-Dene) -and by testing the ability of the Inductive Projection Learner (Gouskova & Gallagher 2020;Gallagher et al 2019) to learn the nonlocal harmony pattern from the distribution of stridents in these corpora. These three languages were chosen because they have sufficient materials available for study and because strident harmony manifests differently in each language.…”

The effect of phonotactics on alternation learning

“…MacEachern 1997). For example, in Bolivian Aymara (data from MacEachern 1997 andGallagher, Gouskova, &Camacho Rios 2019), nonidentical ejectives cannot cooccur within a morpheme (4), but they can cooccur across morpheme boundaries within the same word (5).…”