Varieties of Noisy Harmonic Grammar

An experiment showed that Japanese speakers’ judgement of Pokémons’ evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls ‘wug-shaped curves’, a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEnt. I show in this paper that the experimental results can indeed be successfully modelled with MaxEnt, and also that Stochastic Optimality Theory faces an interesting set of challenges. The study was inspired by a proposal made within formal phonology, and reveals important previously understudied aspects of sound symbolism. In addition, it demonstrates how cumulativity is manifested in linguistic patterns. The work here shows that formal phonology and research on sound symbolism can be mutually beneficial.

Section: A Wug-shaped Curvementioning

confidence: 99%

A wug-shaped curve in sound symbolism: the case of Japanese Pokémon names

Kawahara

2020

“…We opt for the more established Maximum Entropy framework (MaxEnt;Goldwater & Johnson 2003, Wilson 2006. For a broader review of gradient constraint-based approaches, see Hayes (2017).…”

Section: Protection Of Existing Itemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positional faithfulness drives laxness alternations in Slovenian

Becker

Jurgec

2020

We analyse the distribution of vowel laxness and stress alternations in Slovenian nouns (for example in the nominative and genitive forms of the masculine noun [ˈjɛzik ~ jeˈzika] ‘tongue’), showing that stress shifts away from mid lax vowels in initial syllables. A stress shift of this sort is predicted by positional faithfulness (Beckman 1997). We show that this prediction is correct, contra McCarthy (2007, 2010) and Jesney (2011). The productivity of the pattern is confirmed in a large-scale nonce-word task. Stress shift in Slovenian is a result of the markedness of mid lax vowels and, perhaps counterintuitively, faithfulness to laxness in initial stressed position.

“…For completeness, (45) shows how the weights can be adjusted to produce Eastern Andalusian's indirect-licensing variants by adopting weights conforming to (35a). For discussion of manipulating weights to produce variation in HG, see Jesney (2007), Pater et al (2007) and Hayes (2017). I leave it for future work to flesh out a rigorous analysis of this optionality (for example, with the reduction in IDENT's weight, the weight of *ɪ,ʊ must be increased to retain the result in (44)), but this gives an indication of what such an analysis might look like.…”

Section: Eastern Andalusian the Salient Difference Between The Licenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positional licensing, asymmetric trade-offs and gradient constraints in Harmonic Grammar

Kaplan

2018

In Harmonic Grammar, positional licensing interacts with faithfulness constraints in pathological ways: spreading a feature to a licensing position to satisfy positional licensing can incur many faithfulness violations, and if there are sufficiently many such violations, they gang up to block spreading. This problem is solved if positional licensing is recast as a positive constraint that rewards licensed features in proportion to the number of positions they are associated with, thereby countering faithfulness's multiple violations. This proposal provides support for positive constraints, calls into question arguments against gradient constraints and lays the groundwork for a sound theory of positional licensing in Harmonic Grammar.