Berko’s (1958) wug-test is a standard part of the phonologist’s toolkit. If you’re not sure if a pattern is productive, why not ask whether speakers extend it to nonce words? It makes sense; it has good face validity. However, I increasingly see linguists who think that the results of wug-tests actually trumps contradictory evidence coming from traditional phonological analysis applied to real words. I respectfully disagree.
Consider for example a proposal by Sanders (2003, 2006). He demonstrates that an alternation in Polish (somewhat imprecisely called o-raising) is not applied to nonce words. From this he takes o-raising to be handled via stem suppletion. He asks, and answers, the very question you may have on your mind. (Note that his H here is the OT constraint hierarchy; you may want to read it as grammar.)
Is phonology obsolete?! No! We still need a phonological H to explain how nonce forms conform to phonotactics. We still need a phonological H to explain sound change. And we may still need H to do more with morphology than simply allow extant (memorized) morphemes to trump nonce forms. (Sanders 2006:10)1
I read a sort of nihilism into this quotation. However, I submit that the fact that 50 million people just speak Polish—and “raise” and “lower” their ó‘s with a high degree of consistency across contexts, lexemes, and so on—is a more entrenched fact than the results of a small nonce word elicitation task. I am not saying that Sander’s results are wrong, or even misleading, just that his theory has escalated the importance of these results to the point where it has almost nothing to say about the very interesting fact that the genitive singular of lód [lut] ‘ice’ is lodu [lɔdu] and not *[ludu], and that tens of millions of people agree.
Endnotes
- Sanders’ 2006 manuscript is a handout but apparently it’s a summary of his 2003 dissertation (Sanders 2003), stripped of some phonetic-interface details not germane to the question at hand. I just mention so that it doesn’t look like I’m picking on a rando. Those familiar with my work will probably guess that I disagree with just about everything in this quotation, but kudos to Sanders for saying something interesting enought to disagree with.
References
Berko, J. 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14: 150-177.
Sanders, N. 2003. Opacity and sound change in the Polish lexicon. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Sanders, N. 2006. Strong lexicon optimization. Ms., Williams College and University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
I agree that it’s dangerous to read too much into a single wug test – they’re psychological experiments and so subject to all kinds of confounding factors and task effects; more specifically, it’s plausible there are phonological rules that apply to subsets of language that don’t include the category of “funny-sounding nonce words”. Any big theoretical update should rely on a number of coherent pieces of evidence.
That said, I think your post is a bit confusing (I’ve changed my understanding of it after a reread.) It reads to me like in the last paragraph you’re promoting brute consistency as the dominant piece of evidence for whether something should count as phonological, a position I’d be shocked to hear you endorse. A question that I think that the field hasn’t always handled well is what kinds of evidence to use to distinguish between synchronic and diachronic (or even past synchronic) phonology, given they both give rise to a similar consistency. Wug tests are one useful piece of evidence for that distinction.
That’s not what I’m saying. But I don’t think the results of the wug-test could possibly answer the synchronic/diachronic question. Rather they are, if you’re lucky telling you something about the productivity of the generalization. And, if you’re lucky, and you have some prior beliefs about the interfaces, the productivity facts might help you figure out whether the thing we call o-raising is a morpheme-level diacritic, an underspecified back vowel, a floating segment, stem suppletion: pick your poison. I think it’s nihilistic, and just incorrect, to assume that wug-test non-productivity implies the stem suppletion-style anaylsis that Sanders takes as obvious.
I agree with most of what you said. I want to clarify why I think a wug-test can provide some evidence for synchronic vs. diachronic phonology. We agree that there is a leaky link between wug-tests and whether o-raising is synchronically represented as morphological suppletion; your original post was pointing out how leaky that link is (Here, I use “leaky link” to mean “implication if you’re lucky and make certain assumptions”). If the alternation were to be suppletive, then there are many facts left unexplained; namely, why the alternation is phonologically natural, and why it’s so consistent, given suppletion allows for arbitrary alternation. This is where the historical side comes in: One explanation for this phonological consistency is that the rule was historically a productive phonological rule. Then there’s a leaky link from suppletion to diachrony, and by transitivity, a leaky link from wug-tests to diachrony. (Leaky links, like weak correlations, may not be transitive if there’s a specific structure to the problem that blocks it, but I don’t see why there would be one here.)
Consistency is not necessarily inconsistent with stem suppletion. (Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I’m agnostic). It’s just something that I think a linguist studying this pattern should be interested in; not to keep beating up on Sanders, but he seems rather uninterested in the grammatical encoding of this pattern, and I don’t see how calling it suppletion explains why suppletion in real stem X isn’t extended to nonce stem Y.
I don’t know if o-raising is “natural” or not. If that means something like “likely to arise as a sound change” in the Ohala/Blevins sense, I don’t see the connection between the height of back vowel and the voicing of the following obstruent. My understanding is that the voicing of the following obstruent interacted with length during a period when Polish had quantity contrasts, and high vowels also raised. The former I’d judge natural (since there are subphonemic differences in the length of the vowel in “bad” vs. “bat” in English, for instance); the latter may also be natural, since long mid vowels do often raise (even if I’m not sure why). But those two pieces put together give rise to a historical alternation is probably not natural in the relevant sense.