[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.] Gorman & Yang (2019), following up on a tip from Margaret Borowczyk (p.c.) discuss inflectional gaps in Polish declension. In this language, masculine genitive singular (gen.sg.) are marked either with -a or -u. The two gen.sg. suffixes have a similar type frequency, and neither appears to be … Continue reading “Defectivity in Polish”
As of yesterday I have completed my series of defectivity case studies, at least for the time being. From these I propose the following tentative taxonomy: Pure allomorphic competition (including “stem change”, stress shift, etc.): English, Polish, Russian (1 2), Greek, Spanish, Hungarian Morpho-metrical constraints: Chaha, Kinande Morpho-phonotactic constraints: Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish It is not clear … Continue reading “The end of defectivity”
I have often wondered whether detailed representational formalism is somehow in conflict with genuine explanation in linguistics. I have been tangentially involved in the cottage industry that is applying the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2005, 2016) to linguistic phenomena, most notably morphological defectivity. In our paper on the subject (Gorman & Yang 2019), we are admittedly … Continue reading “Representation vs. explanation?”
[The following is geared towards our incoming students. I’m just using the blog as a easy publishing mechanism.] The following are some major projects ongoing in the GC Computational Linguistics Lab. Many phonologists believe that phonotactic knowledge is independent of knowledge of phonological alternations. In my dissertation I evaluated computational models of autonomous phonotactic knowledge … Continue reading “Major projects at the Computational Linguistics lab”
In Gorman & Yang 2019 (henceforth GY), we provide an analysis of metaphonic patterns in Spanish. This is just one of four or five case studies and it is a bit too brief to go into some interesting representational issues. In this post I’ll try to fill some of the missing details as I understand … Continue reading “Magic and productivity: Spanish metaphony”