Source-Oriented Generalizations as Grammar Inference in Russian Vowel Deletion

Abstract

Speakers learn detailed generalizations about the morphophonology of their language, and extend them to nonce words. We propose a theory of this morphophonological knowledge that partitions the lexicon into uniform and productive sublexicons. Each sublexicon has its own phonotactic grammar, which the speaker uses as an inference mechanism to determine the relative productivity of each sublexicon. We report the results of an experiment on the generalization of mid vowel deletion ("yer" deletion) in Russian, showing that speakers encode source-oriented generalizations about the shapes of words that can undergo vowel deletion, as well as product-oriented generalizations about words that result from vowel deletion. An implementation of our model learns the patterns of deletion and captures both source-oriented and productoriented generalizations.*For their insightful questions, comments, and suggestions, we wish to thank

Phonotactic restrictions and morphology in Aymara

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The Acquisition Path of [w]-final Plurals in Brazilian Portuguese

“…There is good reason to believe that this protection of monosyllables is universal. First, the same tendency is observed in a variety of languages, such as French (Becker et al 2017), Turkish (Becker et al 2011), Russian (Becker & Gouskova 2016), and others. In Turkish, for example, stem-final voiceless stops often voice when a vowel-initial suffix is added, e.g., [ɡuɾup] 'group' ~ [ɡuɾubu] 'group.acc'.…”

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“…verbs, with adjectives somewhere in between; Smith 2011). The second type of approach to lexical class specific phonology allows each lexical class to have its own completely independent phonological profile, without a priori restrictions or specifications on the structure of the grammar (Anttila 2002;Inkelas & Zoll 2007;Pater 2009;Becker & Gouskova, to appear; see also Itô & Mester 1995b). * For discussion on various portions of this work, we thank Laura MacPherson, Brian Smith, Alan Yu, Kie Zuraw, and audiences at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, CLS 2015, andAMP 2015. 2…”