Generative phonotactics
Kyle Gorman
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Abstract
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This dissertation outlines the empirical scope of phonotactic theory and argues that the core principles of phonotactic knowledge are compatible with a distinct view from the lexicon, which is categorical and closely related to phonological processes. The work critiques the probabilistic view of phonotactics as a gradient process independent of phonology and emphasizes the importance of phonotactic knowledge in language comprehension.
Figures (48)
Key takeaways
- Static phonotactic constraints previously proposed to describe gaps in the inventory of medial clusters are found to be statistically unsound, whereas phonological alternations impose robust restrictions on the cluster inventory.
- Categorical and gradient aspects of wordlikeness Much of the recent work in phonotactic theory has aempted to implement the intuition that phonotactic wellformedness is not an "all-or-nothing" maer.
- Similarly, Hayes and Wilson (2008), who compare their gradient model of wordlikeness against a set of English phonotactic constraints proposed by Clements and Keyser (1983), first transform these constraints, several of which are without exception, into probabilities.
- In the absence of phonotactic violences, lile variance in wordlikeness ratings can be aributed to phonotactic wellformedness, making it difficult to determine the coverage of gradient wellformedness models.
- is chapter focuses on three phonotactic generalizations in Turkish, comparing lexical statistics and the results of a wordlikeness task performed by Zimmer (1969).
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Review of Bethin, Christina Y. 1998. Slavic prosody: Language change and phonological theory (Cambridge studies in linguistics, 86). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xvi + 349 pp.
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