The Role of Phonetic Knowledge in Phonological Patterning: Corpus and Survey Evidence from Tagalog Infixation

Abstract

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,

Stem-final obstruent variation in Korean

“…However, the variable, gradient, patterns recently attract much attention with the understanding that the exceptions and variants occur in a systematic way in many cases. The results of some recent research on the variation data (Bybee 2001;Boersma and Hayes 2001;Zuraw 2000Zuraw , 2002Zuraw , 2005Albright 2002Albright a,b, 2005Albright , 2008Albright and Hayes 2003;Pierrehumbert 2003Pierrehumbert , 2006Hayes and Londe 2006) show that the variation pattern observed in the speakers' behavior is matched by the statistical pattern in the lexicon, supporting the hypothesis that the speakers may internalize the variable lexical pattern and use the knowledge in their behavior. The important evidence in favor of the hypothesis comes from the data of productivity-testing such as loanword adaptation and wug-test (Burko 1958).…”

Evidence for a learning bias against saltatory phonological alternations

“…A soft bias is typically implemented in models using a prior, which makes certain outcomes, within the space of possible outcomes, have higher a priori likelihoods relative to others. The idea that such soft biases have a role in phonological learning has been growing in the literature (e.g., see Wilson, 2006;Zuraw, 2007;Finley & Badecker, 2008;Moreton, 2008;Hayes et al, 2009;Hayes & White, 2013). Implementing a fully functioning learning model to account for these results is beyond the scope of this paper.…”

“…(Saffran & Thiessen, 2003;Wilson, 2006;Zuraw, 2007;Finley & Badecker, 2008;Moreton, 2008;Hayes et al, 2009;Becker et al, 2011;Skoruppa, Lambrechts, & Peperkamp, 2011;Baer-Henney & van de Vijver, 2012;Becker et al, 2012;Finley & Badecker, 2012;Hayes & White, 2013).…”

Mayak and the Typology of Labial Harmony

“…Kaun argues that high round vowels are preferred targets for harmony because they are more perceptually salient, and thus better cues to the roundness of the initial trigger. In contrast, the present analysis assumes that a vowel's likelihood of undergoing harmony is conditioned upon its relationship to its surface harmonic pair, where more similar contrasts are more likely to undergo alternations, following Steriade (2001;Zuraw 2007Zuraw , 2013Hayes & White 2015). This is encoded in the formalism via a surface markedness constraint banning alternations that exceed some categorical boundary, n.…”