Generalization of French and Portuguese plural alternations and initial syllable protection

Abstract

We present two cases of morphophonological alternations in the plural of nouns, one from French and one from Brazilian Portuguese. In both of them, monosyllabic items are protected from right-edge alternations more than polysyllabic items are, an asymmetry we attribute to privileged protection of initial syllables. We implement the analyses of the two languages using constraint-based grammars that take trends learned across the lexicon and predict the treatment of nonce words. Five largescale nonce word tasks confirm the productivity of the trend in both languages.

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'.…”

“…For a fuller description and analysis of Brazilian Portuguese plural morphology, the reader is referred to Mattoso Câmara (1953), Abaurre (1983), Morales-Front & Holt (1997), Huback (2007), Gomes & Manoel (2010), among others. Becker et al (2017) survey the [w]-final nouns and adjectives in the lexicon, with a focus on two factors, as seen in Table 1: the laxness of the final vowel and monosyllabicity of the stem. The alternation is common in polysyllables and in words whose final vowel is Becker, M, et al (2018).…”

“…The least common diphthongs are those that have no height distinction at all, such as [iw] or [uj]. Following Becker et al (2017), the effect is operationalized as the markedness constraint *ShallowDiph, which penalizes tense vowel+glide combinations such as The preference for the low-initial [aj] over the high-initial [uj] is evident throughout the lexicon; a search in the Mac-Morpho corpus (Fonseca et al 2015) suggests that the type frequency of [aj] is about four times greater than that of [uj] (930 vs. 239). The mid vowels, however, do not follow the universal height preference: [oj] is more frequent than [ɔj] (221 vs. 52 types).…”

The role of gesture in the English ish-construction

“…As such, I residualize the social attribute ratings by regressing them against the Naturalness rating, calculating the residuals, and using the residuals as the dependent variable for the analysis outlined in (4). Because residuals capture the amount of variability in a data set not explained by a model, doing this allows us to test our fixed and random effects on the data not explained by Naturalness (see MacKenzie 2012, Becker et al 2017. Any significant effects thus represent an effect on the social attribute, which is our target.…”

Lexicon against Naturalness: Unnatural Gradient Phonotactic Restrictions in Tarma Quechua

“…Using Hayes & Wilson (2008)'s Phonotactic Learner to identify systematic gaps, they find that, for instance, the English lexicon features a restriction against /Z/ before a stressed vowel followed by an obstruent (*[+continuant, +voice, −anterior] [+stress] [−son] in constraint formalism; Hayes & White 2013), yet learners did not generalize this to nonce words as strongly as they generalize phonetically motivated constraints. Most studies on this problem agree that speakers do not generalize unmotivated phonotactic restrictions to nonce words, with the suggestion that they might not be represented in grammar (Becker et al, 2011(Becker et al, , 2012Hayes & White, 2013;Becker et al, 2017;Wilson & Gallagher, 2018). Other studies (for instance, Hayes 2009) suggest instead that unmotivated processes can actually be generalized to nonce words, but to a lesser extent than natural processes.…”