~ ROA Version, 8/2002. Essentially identical to the Tech Report, with new pagination (but the same footnote and example numbering); correction of typos, oversights & outright errors; improved typography; and occasional small-scale clarificatory rewordings. Citation should include reference to this version.

The study of phonotactics (e.g., the ability of English speakers to distinguish possible words like blick from impossible words like *bnick) is a central topic in phonology. We propose a theory of phonotactic grammars and a learning algorithm that constructs such grammars from positive evidence. Our grammars consist of constraints that are assigned numerical weights according to the principle of maximum entropy. Possible words are assessed by these grammars based on the weighted sum of their constraint violations. The learning algorithm yields grammars that can capture both categorical and gradient phonotactic patterns. The algorithm is not provided with any constraints in advance, but uses its own resources to form constraints and weight them. A baseline model, in which Universal Grammar is reduced to a feature set and an SPE-style constraint format, suffices to learn many phonotactic phenomena. In order to learn nonlocal phenomena such as stress and vowel harmony, it is necessary to augment the model with autosegmental tiers and metrical grids. Our results thus offer novel, learning-theoretic support for such representations. We apply the model to English syllable onsets, Shona vowel harmony, quantity-insensitive stress typology, and the full phonotactics of Wargamay, showing that the learned grammars capture the distributional generalizations of these languages and accurately predict the findings of a phonotactic experiment.

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Segmental quantity-the distinction between long and short vowels or geminate and simplex consonants-is preserved under specifiable conditions in reduplication. ’ Current nonlinear phonology holds, for a number

Two questions regarding the non-local nature of long-distance agreement in consonantal harmony patterns (Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004) are addressed: (1) How can such patterns be learned from surface forms alone? (2) How can we understand a a major feature of the typology—the absence of blocking effects? It is shown that a learner which generalizes only by making distinctions with respect to the order of sounds (and by not making distinctions with respect to the distance between sounds) is able to learn major classes of long-distance phonotactic patterns, and is unable to learn hypothetical long-distance phonotactic patterns with blocking effects. Thus not only is the learner able to acquire attested patterns, it explains the absence of unattested ones. Furthermore, this result lends support to the idea that long distance phonotactic patterns are phenomonologically distinct from spreading patterns contra the hypothesis of Strict Locality (Gafos 1999, et seq).

The psychological reality of an abstract consonant dissimilation constraint is demonstrated in an experiment with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. In this experiment, novel verbs containing constraint violations and those without violations were presented orthographically for judgments of well-formedness. Native speaker well-formedness judgments reflected knowledge of the phonotactic constraint. Systematic gaps were rated much less wordlike than accidental gaps that were equivalent in their lexical characteristics. Judgments for novel verbs containing constraint violations were also gradiently influenced by consonant pair similarity. The experimental study supports previous dictionary-based phonotactic analyses that propose that the native speaker’s knowledge of consonant cooccurrence constraints in Arabic is based on emergent generalizations over the lexical items in an abstract root lexicon.* The phonotactic constraints of a language define the set of possible words in that language. Typically, phonotactic constraints are restrictions on the possible consonant clusters in a language or conditions on the minimal prosodic unit that can be considered a word. Such constraints undoubtedly have an impact on productive word formation and foreign word accommodation, and thus these constraints are assumed to be active

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very pleased to have had the encouragement and support of a committee of three linguists for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration: Mark Liberman, William Labov and Eugene Buckley. Each of them made my transition back to Penn pleasant after what seemed like a long absence. It was a great pleasure to have Mark Randolph both as an external reader and as a colleague at Motorola. Mark’s work at MIT a decade ago has served as an inspiration to me. Orhan Karaali made this dissertation possible in this millennium. As my manager for over two years at Motorola, Orhan insisted on making my dissertation a priority at work. Harry Bliss provided his voice to this project and our whole group is very grateful for his patience and cooperation. My colleagues at Motorola listened to my ideas and provided technical and theoretical assistance at every turn: Noel

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In this paper I show that, as in languages like Tagalog, the position of infixes in Kashaya (a Pomoan language of northern California) is subordinate to surface phonological well-formedness. What distinguishes Kashaya from more typical examples of this sort is that infixation occurs for featural, rather than strictly syllabic, reasons: to improve the featural content of the coda, and to prevent the deletion of distinctive features. In both cases, coronal consonants behave as special relative to labials and dorsals. I begin