Defectivity in Icelandic

Hansson (1999; henceforth H) discusses an interesting case of defectivity in Icelandic imperative formation. According to H, this language has three types of (2sg.) imperative.

The root imperative is available only as a “deliberate archaism”; it won’t be considered further.
The full imperative consists of the root plus a coronal suffix plus a 2sg. pronominal enclitic -u /ʏ/.
The clipped imperative also consists of the root plus a coronal suffix but uses a contrastively stressed pronoun ‘you’ (cf. English ‘YOU work!’) instead of a clitic.

For example, the full imperative for taka ‘to take’ is taktu [ˈtʰaxtʏ] and the clipped imperative is takt ÞÚ [tʰaxt ˈθuː].¹ H develops an account of the allomorphy of the dental suffix in the full and clipped imperatives; going forward I will cite the full forms, since the distinction is irrelevant. Under H’s analysis, there are two allomorphs:

/-T-/ is a [−spread glottis] coronal obstruent surfacing as [t] or [ð] depending on context; e.g., the full imperative for negla ‘to nail’ is negldu [ˈnɛɣ͡ltʏ].²
/-Tʰ-/ is a [+spread glottis] coronal obstruent, surfacing as [t] with devoicing of preceding stem-final consonants; e.g., the full imperative for synda ‘to swim’ is syntu [ˈsɪn̥tʏ].

H claims that “[f]or the vast majority of verbs, the choice of allomorph is uniquely determined on the basis of the root-final consonant(s)” (p. 108), implying that this is a phonologically conditioned allomorphy, though the conditioning is not given in prose form. H also implies (fn. 4) that this is suppletive allomorphy, though this assumption is also not justified. Let us assume, for sake of argument, that both assumptions are correct and this is a case of phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy. Finally, H notes that under his assumptions, there are certain roots for which either allomorph would give the same imperative surface form.

There are several exceptional verbs for which the phonological conditioning H proposes yields an incorrect result. For instance, the full imperative of senda ‘to send’ is the /-T-/ form sendu [ˈsɛntʏ] rather than the expected /-Tʰ-/ form *[ˈsɛn̥tʏ].³ H draws attention to weak verbs whose roots end in /ll, nn/. For these, H’s account of the phonological conditioning ought to prefer /-T-/, but most select /-Tʰ-/.⁴

There are four strong verbs whose roots end in /ll, nn/. So far, other than the characteristic ablaut, we have seen no reason to treat imperative formation in the strong verbs differently than in weak verbs.⁵ For example, for stela ‘to steal’, the full imperative is the /-T-/ form steldu [ˈstɛltʏ]. Yet, there are three strong verbs in /ll, nn/ for which neither possible form of the imperative is well-formed. These are the verbs vinna ‘to work’ (*vinndu, *vinntu), spinna ‘to spin (s.t.)’ (*spinndu, *spinntu), and falla ‘to fall; flunk’ (*falldu, *falltu). And to make matters more complex, there is one strong verb in /nn/ for which the “expected” /-T-/ is acceptable: the full imperative of finna ‘to find’ is finndu [ˈfɪntʏ].

H identifies the following explananda for imperative formation in Icelandic.

The imperative stem is always the same as the past stem in weak verbs
Yet, defectivity is found only in imperatives and never in pasts.
Defectivity occurs only in strong verbs.
Defectivity is found only in roots in /ll, nn/, a form which “usually is indicative of exceptionality in allomorph selection” (p. 344).

It is not obvious to me that the first explanandum is meaningful. While many linguists believe “Priscian”-like mechanisms which permit direct encoding of these kinds of facts, the mere stem identity of two semantically distant parts of speech is not itself compelling evidence. In this particular case, one might implement these facts without referring to identity by deriving the allomorphy from a verbal theme, perhaps a floating [α spread glottis] feature, which surfaces in both the imperative and the past. Thus roots selecting /-Tʰ-/ might be underlyingly someting like /√-ʰ/ where the surd denotes the root and /ʰ/ a thematic [+spread glottis] specification.

The second explanandum does seem to be meaningful, even independently of the first. One possible fact that might be relevant here is that (other than the enclitic) the Icelandic imperative is bare, whereas weak verb stems are, to my knowledge, always followed by a vowel-initial suffix. So one could imagine that this is, in part, a phonotactic effect at some level of prosodic structure that does not include the clitic.

The third explanandum also seems meaningful. One can, for instance, frame it as a simple statistical hypothesis test, the null hypothesis being that imperative defectivity is independent of the strong/weak distinction. While I don’t have psychologically plausible counts of the strong and weak verbs—the numbers I need to compute sufficient statistics for this test—in front of me, I suspect the probability of observing this pattern under the null hypothesis is going to be vanishingly small.

The fourth and final explanandum is certainly one worth incorporating into any analysis. However, I think the obvious step has not yet been taken: serious attempts out to be made to incorporate it into a phonological account of the coronal suffix allomorphy, something H unfortunately has not attempted. If we are in fact to regard verbs in /ll, nn/ as lexically exceptional, one should first reasonably exhaust possible phonological accounts. One direction for future research would be to better understand the allomorphy associated with the imperative and past stems in Icelandic in general.

H proposes, essentially, that defectivity results in strong verbs in /ll, nn/ because such verbs lack a coronal-suffixed past tense form elsewhere in the paradigm; he adds that the strong imperative finndu is exempted because there are other /…nt/ forms in the paradigm of that verb. So many, many, many different things have to go wrong for a defective imperative in Icelandic: essentially, one has to be imperative, in /ll, nn/, and lack other coronal-final stems, and this come together in just three verbs in the entire language. Whether or not one finds H’s account compelling, it is very difficult to reason much about the theory of defectivity from the existence of no more than three verbs in a language. We might do better to focus on languages, like Greek or Russian, in which inflectional defectivity has much higher type frequency.

Endnotes

Whether or not the full and the clipped imperative are pragmatically substitutable is unclear to me from H’s description.
Unfortunately, H does not always give the orthographic form of the words he is citing, and given the language’s famously difficult spelling, I am not always certain I have guessed the correct spelling for inflected forms. However, it appears to me that the contrast between /-T-/ and /-Tʰ-/ is spelled as -d- vs. -t-.
Once again, it is not clear why this is the expected form because the only description of the phonological conditioning is given in a sketchy Optimality Theory analysis (H:§2.1-2).
The relevant statistic is that 6 out of 33 weak verbs in /ll, nn/ select the “expected” /-T-/. From this H concludes that in this environment, “the exceptions far outnumber the regulars” (p. 113). I note briefly that under the tolerance principle (Yang 2005), an environment of 33 examples can tolerate up to 9 exceptions, so this could be a productive generalization according to that theory.
In H’s examples, strong imperatives use the same ablaut grade as the infinitive, so we just have to take his word that they are in fact strong.

References

Hansson, G. Ó. 1999. ‘When in doubt…’: intraparadigmatic dependencies and gaps in Icelandic. In Proceedings of NELS 29, pages 105-119. GLSA Publications.
Yang, C. 2005. On productivity. Language Variation Yearbook 5: 333-370.

When rule directionality does and does not matter

At the Graduate Center we recently hosted an excellent lecture by Jane Chandlee of Haverford College. Those familiar with her work may know that she’s been studying, for some time now, two classes of string-to-string functions called the input strictly local (ISL) and output strictly local (OSL) functions. These are generalizations of the familiar notion of the strictly local (SL) languages proposed by McNaughton and Papert (1971) many years ago. For definitions of ISL and OSL functions, see Chandlee et al. 2014 and Chandlee 2014. Chandlee and colleagues have been arguing, for some time now, that virtually all phonological processes are ISL, OSL, or both (note that their intersection is non-null).

In her talk, Chandlee attempted to formalize the notions of iterativity and non-iterativity in phonology with reference to ISL and OSL functions. One interesting side effect of this work is that one can, quite easily, determine what makes a phonological process direction-invariant or direction-specific. In FSTP (Gorman & Sproat 2021:§5.1.1) we describe three notions of rule directionality (ones which are quite a bit less general than Chandlee’s notions) from the literature, but conclude: “Note, however, that directionality of application has no discernable effect for perhaps the majority of rules, and can often be ignored.” (op. cit., 53) We didn’t bother to determine when this is the case, but Chandlee shows that the set of rules which are invariant to direction of application (in our sense) are exactly those which are ISL ∩ OSL; that is, they describe processes which are both ISL and OSL, in the sense that they are string-to-string functions (or maps, to use her term) which can be encoded either as ISL or OSL.

As Richard Sproat (p.c.) points out to me, there are weaker notions of direction-invariance we may care about in the context of grammar engineering. For instance, it might be the case that some rule is, strictly speaking, direction-specific, but the language of input strings is not expected to contain any relevant examples. I suspect this is quite common also.

References

Chandlee, J. 2014. Strictly local phonological processes. Doctoral dissertation, University of Delaware.
Chandlee, J., Eyraud, R., and Heinz, J. 2014. Learning strictly local subsequential functions. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2: 491-503.
Gorman, K., and Sproat, R. 2021. Finite-State Text Processing. Morgan & Claypool.
McNaughton, R., and Papert, S. A. 1971. Counter-Free Automata. MIT Press.

Dutch names in LaTeX

One thing I recently figured out is a sensible way to handle Dutch names (i.e., those that begin with den, van or similar particles. Traditionally, these particles are part of the cited name in author-date citations (e.g., den Dikken 2003, van Oostendorp 2009) but are ignored when alphabetizing (thus, van Oostendorp is alphabetized between Orgun & Sprouse and Otheguy, not between Vago and Vaux). This is not something handled automatically by tools like LaTeX and BibTeX, but it is relatively easy to annotate name particles like this so that they do the right thing.

First, place, at the top of your BibTeX file, the following:

@preamble{{\providecommand{\noopsort}[1]{}}}

Then, in the individual BibTeX entries, wrap the author field with this command like so:

 author = {{\noopsort{Dikken}{den Dikken}}, Marcel},

This preserves the correct in-text author-date citations, but also gives the intended alphabetization in the bibliography.

Note of course that not all people with van (etc.) names in the Anglosphere treat the van as if it were a particle to be ignored; a few deliberately alphabetize their last name as if it begins with v.

On conspiracies

Kisseberth (1970) introduces the notion of conspiracies, cases in which a series of phonological rules in a single language “conspire” to create similar output configurations. Supposedly, Haj Ross chose the term “conspiracy”, and it is perhaps not an accident that the term he chose immediately reminds one of conspiracy theory, which has a strong negative connotation implying that the existence of the conspiracy cannot be proven. Kisseberth’s discovery of conspiracies motivated the rise of Optimality Theory (OT) two decades later—Prince & Smolensky (1993:1) refer to conspiracies as a “conceptual crisis” at the heart of phonological theory, and Zuraw (2003) explicitly links Kisseberth’s data to OT—but curiously, it seemingly had little effect on contemporary phonological theorizing. (A positivist might say that the theoretical technology needed to encode conspiratorial thinking simply did not exist at the time; a cynic might say that contemporaries did not take Kisseberth’s conspiratorial thinking seriously until it became easy to do so.) I discern two major objections to the logic of conspiracies: the evolutionary argument and the prosodic argument, which I’ll briefly review.

The evolutionary argument

What I am calling the evolutionary argument was first made by Kiparsky (1973:75f.) and is presented as an argument against OT by Hale & Reiss (2008:14). Roughly, if a series of rules lead to the same set of output configurations, they must be surface true, or they would not contribute to the putative conspiracy. Since surface-true rules are assumed to be easy to learn, especially relative to opaque rules are assumed to be difficult to learn, and since failure to learn rules would contribute to language change, grammars will naturally accumulate functionally related surface-true rules. I think we should question the assumption (au courant in 1973) that opacity is the end-all of what makes a rule difficult to acquire, but otherwise I find this basic logic sound.

The prosodic argument

At the time Kisseberth was writing, standard phonological theory included few of the prosodic primitives; even the notion of syllable was considered dubious. Subsequent revisions of the theory have introduced rich hierarchies of prosodic primitives. In particular, a subsequent generation of phonologists hypothesized that speakers “build” or “parse” sequences of segments into onsets and rimes, syllables, and feet, with repairs like stray erasure, i.e., deletion, of unsyllabified segmental or epenthesis used to resolve conflicts (McCarthy 1979, Steriade 1982, Itô 1986). It seems to me that this approach accounts for most of the facts of Yowlumne (formerly Yawelmani) reviewed by Kisseberth in his study:

there are no word-initial CC clusters
there are no word-final CC clusters
derived CCCs are resolved either by deletion or i-epenthesis
there are no CCC clusters in underlying form

The relevant observation that links all these facts is simply that Yowlumne does not permit branching onsets or codas, but more specifically, Yowlumne’s syllable-parsing algorithm does not build branching onsets or codas. This immediately accounts for facts #1-2. Assuming the logic of the McCarthy and contemporaries, #3 is also unsurprising: these clusters simply cannot be realized faithfully; the fact that there are multiple resolutions for the *CCC pathology is besides the point. And finally, adopting the logic that Prince & Smolensky (1993:54) were later to call Stampean occultation, the absence of underlying CCC clusters follows from the inability of them to surface, since the generalizations in question are all surface-true. (Here, we are treading closely to Kiparsky’s thoughts on the matter too.) Crucially, the analysis given above does not reify any surface constraints; the facts all follow from the feed-forward derivational structure of prosodically-informed phonological theory current a decade before Prince & Smolensky.

Conclusion

While Prince & Smolensky are right to say that OT provides a principled solution to Kisseberth’s notion of conspiracies, researchers in the ’70s and ’80s treated Kisseberth’s notion as epiphenomena of acquisition (Kiparsky) or prosodic structure-building (McCarthy and contemporaries). Perhaps, then, OT do not deserve credit for solving an unsolved problem in this regard. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the many implicit conjectures in these two objections can be sustained.

References

Hale, M. and Reiss, C. 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford University Press.
Kiparsky, P. 1973. Phonological representations. In O. Fujimura (ed.), Three Dimensions of Linguistic Theory, pages 1-135. TEC Corporation.
Kisseberth, C. W. 1970. On the functional unity of phonological rules. Linguistic Inquiry 1(3): 291-306.
Itô, J. 1986. Syllable theory in prosodic phonology. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Published by Garland Publishers, 1988.
McCarthy, J. 1979. Formal problems in Semitic phonology and morphology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Published by Garland Publishers, 1985.
Prince, A., and Smolensky, P. 1993. Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science Technical Report TR-2.
Steriade, D. 1982. Greek prosodies and the Nature of syllabification. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Zuraw, K. 2003. Optimality Theory in linguistics. In M. Arbib (ed.), Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, pages 819-822. 2nd edition. MIT Press.

On the Germanic *tl gap

One “parochial” constraint in Germanic is the absence of branching onsets consisting of a coronal stop followed by /l/. Thus /pl, bl, kl, gl/ are all common in Germanic, but *tl and *dl are not. It is difficult to understand what might gives rise to this phonotactic gap.

Blevins & Grawunder (2009), henceforth B&G, note that in portions of Saxony and points south, *kl has in fact shifted to [tl] and *gl to [dl]. This sound change has been noted in passing by several linguists, going back to at least the 19th century. This change has the hallmarks of a change from below: it does not appear to be subject to social evaluation and is not subject to “correction” in careful speech styles. B&G also note that many varieties of English have undergone this change; according to Wright, it could be found in parts of east Yorkshire. Similarly, no social stigma seems to have attached to this pronunciation, and B&G suggest it may have even made its way into American English. B&G argue that since it has occurred at least twice, KL > TL is a natural sound change in the relevant sense.

Of particular interest to me is B&G’s claim that one structural factor supporting *KL > TL is the absence of TL in Germanic before this change; in all known instances of *KL > TL, the preceding stage of the language lacked (contrastive) TL. While many linguists have argued that TL is universally marked, and that its absence in Germanic is a structural gap in the relevant sense, this does not seem to be borne out by quantitative typology of a wide range of language families.

Of course, other phonotactic gaps, even statistically robust ones, also are similarly filled with ease. I submit that evidence of this sort suggests that phonologists habitually overestimate the “structural” nature of phonotactic gaps.

References

Blevins, J. and Grawunder, S. 2009. *KL > TL sound change in Germanic and elsewhere: descriptions, explanations, and implications. Linguistic Typology 13: 267-303.

The role of phonotactics in language change

How does phonotactic knowledge influence the path taken by language change? As is often the case, the null hypothesis seems to be simply that it doesn’t. Perhaps speakers have projected a phonotactic constraint C into the grammar of Old English, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Middle English will conform to C, or even that Middle English won’t freely borrow words that flagrantly violate C.

One case comes from the history of English. As is well known, modern English /ʃ/ descends from Old English sk; modern instances of word-initial sk are mostly borrowed from Dutch (e.g., skipper) or Norse (e.g., ski); sky was borrowed from an Old Norse word meaning ‘cloud’ (which tells you a lot about the weather in the Danelaw). Furthermore, Old English forbids super-heavy long vowel-consonant cluster rimes. Because the one major source for /ʃ/ is sk, and because a word-final long vowel followed by sk was unheard of, V̄ʃ# was rare in Middle English and word-final sequences of tense vowels followed by [ʃ] are still rare in Modern English (Iverson & Salmons 2005). Of course there are exceptions, but according to Iverson & Salmons, they tend to:

be markedly foreign (e.g., cartouche),
to be proper names (e.g., LaRouche),
or to convey an “affective, onomatopoeic quality” (e.g., sheesh, woosh).

However, it is reasonably clear that all of these were added during the Middle or Modern period. Clearly, this constraint, which is still statistically robust (Gorman 2014:85), did not prevent speakers from borrowing and coining exceptions to it. However, it is hard to rule out any historical effect of the constraint: perhaps there would be more Modern English V̄ʃ# words otherwise.

Another case of interest comes from Latin. As is well known Old Latin went through a near-exceptionless “Neogrammarian” sound change, a “primary split” or “conditioned merge” of intervocalic s with r. (The terminus ante quem, i.e., the latest possible date, for the actuation of this change is the 4th c. BCE.) This change had the effect of temporarily eliminating all traces of intervocalic s in late Old Latin (Gorman 2014b). From this fact, one might posit that speakers of this era of Latin might project a *VsV constraint. And, one might posit that this would prevent subsequent sound changes from reintroducing intervocalic s. But this is clearly not the case: in the 1st c. BCE, degemination of ss after diphthongs and long monophthongs reintroduced intervocalic s (e.g., caussa > classical causa ’cause’). It is also clear that loanwords with intervocalic s were freely borrowed, and with the exception of the very early Greek borrowing tūs-tūris ‘incense’, none of them were adapted in any way to conform to a putative *VsV constraint:

(1) Greek loanwords: ambrosia ‘id.’, *asōtus ‘libertine’ (acc.sg. asōtum), basis ‘pedestal’, basilica ‘public hall’, casia ‘cinnamon’ (cf. cassia), cerasus ‘cherry’, gausapa ‘woolen cloth’, lasanum ‘cooking utensil’, nausea ‘id.’, pausa ‘pause’, philosophus ‘philosopher’, poēsis ‘poetry’, sarīsa ‘lance’, seselis ‘seseli’
(2) Celtic loanwords: gaesī ‘javelins’, omāsum ‘tripe’
(3) Germanic loanwords: glaesum ‘amber’, bisōntes ‘wild oxen’

References

Gorman, K. 2014a. A program for phonotactic theory. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pages 79-93.
Gorman, K. 2014b. Exceptions to rhotacism, In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pages 279-293.
Iverson, G. K. and Salmons, J. C. 2005. Filling the gap: English tense vowel plus final
/š/. Journal of English Linguistics 33: 1-15.

Allophones and pure allophones

I assume you know what an allophone is. But what this blog post supposes […beat…] is that you could be more careful about how you talk about them.

Let us suppose the following:

the phonemic inventory P of some grammar G contains t and d
P does not contain s or z
yet instances of s or z are found on the surface

Thus we might say that /t, d/ are phonemes and [s, z] are allophones (perhaps of /t, d/: maybe in G, derived coronal stop clusters undergo assibilation).

Let us suppose that you’re writing the introduction to a phonological analysis of G, and in Table 1—it’s usually Table 1—you list the phonemes you posit, sorted by place and manner. Perhaps you will place s and z in italics or brackets, and the caption will indicate that this refers to segments which are allophones.

I find this imprecise. It suggests that all instances of surface t or d are phonemic (or perhaps more precisely, and more vacuously, are faithful allophones),¹ which need not be the case. Perhaps G has a rule of perseveratory obstruent cluster voice assimilation and one can derive surface [pt] from /…p-d…/, or surface [gd] from /…g-t…/, and so on. The confusion here seems to be that we are implicitly treating the sets of allophones and phonemes are disjoint when the former is a superset of the latter. What we seem to actually mean when we say that [s, z] are allophones is rather that they are pure allophones: allophones which are not also phonemes.

Another possible way to clarify the hypothetical table 1 is to simply state what phonemes s and z are allophones of, exactly. For instance, if they are purely derived by assibilation, we might write that “the stridents s, z are (pure) allophones of the associated coronal stops /t, d/ respectively”. However, since this might be besides the point, and because there’s no principled upper bound on how many phonemic sources a given (pure or otherwise) allophone might have, I think it should suffice to suggest that s and z are pure allophones and leave it at that.²

This imprecision, I suspect, is a hang-over from structuralist phonemics, which viewed allophony as separate (and arguably, more privileged or entrenched) than alternations (then called morphophonemics). Of course, this assumption does not appear to have any compelling justification, and as Halle (1959) shows, it leads to substantial duplication (in the sense of Kisseberth 1970) between rules of allophony and rules of neutralization.³ Most linguists since Halle seem to have found the structuralist stipulation and the duplication it gives rise to aesthetically displeasing; I concur.

Endnotes

I leave open the question of whether surface representations ever contain phonemes: perhaps vacuous rules “faithfully” convert them to allophones.
One could (and perhaps should) go further into feature logic, and as such, regard both phonemes and pure allophones as mere bundles of features linked to a single timing slot. However, this makes things harder to talk about.
I do not assume that “neutralization” is a grammatical primitive. It is easily defined (see Bale & Reiss 2017, ch. 20) but I see no reason to suppose that grammars distinguish neutralizing processes from other processes.

References

Bale, A. and Reiss, C. 2018. Phonology: A Formal Introduction. MIT Press.
Halle, M. 1959. Sound Pattern of Russian. Mouton.
Kisseberth, C. W. 1970. On the functional unity of phonological rules. Linguistic Inquiry 1(3): 291-306.

The alternation phonotactic hypothesis

The hypothesis

In a recent handout, I discuss the following hypothesis, implicit in my dissertation (Gorman 2013):

(1) Alternation Phonotactic Hypothesis: Let A, B, C, and D be (possibly-null) string sets. Then, if a grammar G contains a surface-true rule of alternation A → B / C __ D, nonce words containing the subsequence CAD are ill-formed for speakers of G.

Before I continue, note that definition is “phenomenological” in the sense that refers to two notions—alternations and surface-true-ness—which are not generally considered to be encoded directly in the grammar. Regarding the notion of alternations, it is not difficult to formalize whether or not a rule is alternating.

(2) Let a rule be defined by possibly-null string sets A, B, C, and D as in (1). Then if any elements of B are phonemes, then the rule is a rule of alternation.

(3) [ditto] If no elements of B are phonemes, then the rule is a rule of (pure) allophony.

But from the argument against bi-uniqueness in Sound Pattern of Russian (Halle 1959), it follows that we should reject a grammar-internal distinction between rules of alternation and allophony, and subsequent theory provides no way to encode this distinction in the grammar. Similarly, it is not hard to define what it means for a rule to be surface-true.

(4) [ditto] If no instances of CAD are generated by the grammar G, then the rule is surface-true.

But, there does not seem to be much reason for that notion to be encoded in the grammar and the theory does not provide any way to encode it.¹Note further that I am also deliberately stating in (1) that a constraint against CAD has been “projected” from the alternation, rather than treating such constraints as autonomous entities of the theory as is done in Optimality Theory (OT) and friends. Finally, I have phrased this in terms of grammaticality (“are ill-formed”) rather than acceptability.

Why might the Alternation Phonotactic Hypothesis (henceforth, APH) be true? First, I take it as obvious that alternations are more entrenched facts about grammars than pure allophony. For instance, in English, stop aspiration could be governed by a rule of allophony, but it is also plausible that English speakers simply represent aspirated stops as such in their lexical entries since there are no aspiration alternations. This point was made separately by Dell (1973) and Stampe (1973), and motivates the notion of lexicon optimization in OT. In contrast, though, rules of alternation (or someting like them) are actually necessary to obtain the proper surface forms. An English speaker who does not have a rule of obstruent voice assimilation will simply not produce the right allomorphs of various affixes. In contrast, the same speaker need not encode a process of nasalization—which in English is clearly allophonic (see, e.g., Kager 1999: 31f.)—to obtain the correct outputs. Given that alternations are entrenched in the relevant sense, it is not impossible to imagine that speakers might “project” constraints out of alternation generalizations in the manner described above. Such constraints could be used during online processing, assuming a strong isomorphism between grammatical representations used during production and perception.² Secondly, since not all alternations are surface-true, it seems reasonable to limit this process of projection to those which are. Were one to project non-surface-true constraints in this fashion, the speaker would find themselves in an awkward position in which actual words are ill-formed.^3,4

The APH is interesting contrasted with the following:

(5) Lexicostatistic Phonotactic Hypothesis: Let A, C, and D be (possibly-null) string sets. Then, if CAD is statistically underrepresented (in a sense to be determined) in the lexicon L of a grammar G, nonce words containing the subsequence CAD are ill-formed for speakers of G.

According to the LSPH (as we’ll call it), phonotactic knowledge is projected not from alternations but from statistical analysis of the lexicon. The LSPH is at least implicit in the robust cottage industry which uses statistical and/or computational modeling of the lexicon to infer the existence of phonotactic generalizations. It is notable how virtually none of the “cottage industry” of LSPH work discusses anything like the APH. Finally, one should note that APH and the LSPH do not exhaust the set of possibilities. For instance, Berent et al. (2007) and Daland et al. (2011) test for effects of the Sonority Sequencing Principle, a putative linguistic universal, on wordlikeness judgments. And some have denied the mere existence of phonotactic constraints.

Gorman 2013 reviews some prior results which argue in favor of the APH, which I’ll describe below.

Consider the putative English phonotactic constraint *V̄ʃ#, a constraint against word-final sequences of tense vowels followed by [ʃ] proposed by Iverson & Salmons (2005). Exceptions to this generalization tend to be markedly foreign (e.g., cartouche), to be proper names (e.g., LaRouche), or to convey an “affective, onomatopoeic quality” (e.g., sheesh, woosh). As Gorman (2013:43f.) notes, this constraint is statistically robust, but Hayes & White (2013) report that it has no measurable effect on English speakers’ wordlikeness judgments. In contrast, three English alternation rules (nasal place assimilation, obstruent voice assimilation, and degemination) have a substantial impact on wordlikeness judgments (Gorman 2013, ch. 4).

A secod, more elaborate example comes from Turkish. Lees (1966a,b) proposes three phonotactic constraints in this language: backness harmony, roundness harmony, and labial attraction. All three of these constraints have exceptions, but Gorman (p. 57-60) shows that they are statistically robust generalizations. Thus, under the LSPH, speakers ought to be sensitive to all three.

Endnotes

I note that the CONTROL module proposed by Orgun & Sprouse (1999) might be a mechanism by which this information could be encoded.
Some evidence that phonotactic knowledge is deployed in production comes from the study of Finnish and Turkish, both of which have robust vowel harmony. Suomi et al. (1997) and Vroomen et al. (1998) find that disharmony seemingly acts as a cue for word boundaries in Finnish, and Kabak et al. (2010) find something similar for Turkish, but not in French, which lacks harmony.
Durvasula & Kahng (2019) find that speakers do not necessarily judge a nonce word to be ill-formed just because it fails to follow certain subtle allophonic generalizations, which suggests that the distinction between allophony and alternation may be important here.
I note that it has sometimes been proposed that actual words of G may in fact be gradiently marked or otherwise degraded w.r.t. to grammar G if they violate phonotactic constraints projected from G (e.g., Coetzee 2008). However, the null hypothesis, it seems to me, is that all actual words are also possible words and so it does not make sense to speak of actual words as marked or ill-formed, gradiently or otherwise.

References

Berent, I., Steriade, D., Lennertz, T., and Vaknin, V. 2007. What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions. Cognition 104: 591-630.
Coetzee, A. W. 2008. Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in phonology. Language 64(2): 218-257. [I critique this briefly in Gorman 2013, p. 4f.]
Daland, R., Hayes, B., White, J., Garellek, M., Davis, A., and Norrmann, I. 2011. Explaining sonority projection effects. Phonology 28: 197-234.
Dell, F. 1973. Les règles et les sons. Hermann.
Durvasula, K. and Kahng, J. 2019. Phonological acceptability is not isomorphic with phonological grammaticality of stimulus. Talk presented at the Annual Meeting on Phonology.
Gorman, K. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Halle, M. 1959. Sound Pattern of Russian. Mouton.
Hayes, B. and White, J. 2013. Phonological naturalness and phonotactic learning. Linguistic Inquiry 44: 45-75.
Iverson, G. K. and Salmons, J. C. 2005. Filling the gap: English tense vowel plus final
/š/. Journal of English Linguistics 33: 1-15.
Kager, R. 1999. Optimality Theory. Cambridge University Press.
Orgun, C. O. and Sprouse, R. 1999. From MPARSE to CONTROL: deriving ungrammaticality. Phonology 16: 191-224.
Kabak, B., Maniwa, K., and Kazanina, N. 2010. Listeners use vowel harmony and word-final stress to spot nonsense words: a study of Turkish and French. Journal of Laboratory Phonology 1: 207-224.
Lees, R. B. 1966a. On the interpretation of a Turkish vowel alternation. Anthropological Linguistics 8: 32-39.
Lees, R. B. 1966b. Turkish harmony and the description of assimilation. Türk Dili
Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belletene 1966: 279-297
Stampe, D. 1973. A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. Garland. [I don’t have this in front of me but if I remember correctly, Stampe argues non-surface true phonological rules are essentially second-class citizens.]
Suomi, K. McQueen, J. M., and Cutler, A. 1997. Vowel harmony and speech segmentation in Finnish. Journal of Memory and Language 36: 422-444.
Vroomen, J., Tuomainen, J. and de Gelder, B. 1998. The roles of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language 38: 133-149.

My SYNC talk

The handout from my SYNC talk, on phonotactics, is available here. I plan to revise it in the next few months and then post it at LingBuzz at some point.

Anatomy of an analogy

I have posted a lightly-revised version of the handout of a talk I gave at Stony Brook University last November here on LingBuzz. In it, I argue that analogical leveling phenomena in Latin previously attributed to pressures against interparadigmatic analogy or towards phonological process overapplication are better understood as the result of Neogrammarian sound change, loss of productivy, and finally covert reanalysis.