~ 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.

Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yet the model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuron-style units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the stem, a set of units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the past form, and an array of connections between the two sets of units whose strengths are modified during learning. Rumelhart and McClelland conclude that linguistic rules may be merely convenient approximate fictions and that the real causal processes in language use and acquisition must be characterized as the transfer of activation levels among units and the modification of the weights of their connections. We analyze both the linguistic and the developmental assumptions of the model in detail and discover that (1) it cannot represent certain words, (2) it cannot learn many rules, (3) it can learn rules found in no human language, (4) it cannot explain morphological and phonological regularities, (5) it cannot explain the differences between irregular and regular forms, (6) it fails at its assigned task of mastering the past tense of English, (7) it gives an incorrect explanation for two developmental phenomena: stages of overregularization of irregular forms such as bringed, and the appearance of doubly-marked forms such as ated, and (8) it gives accounts of two others (infrequent overregularization of verbs ending in t/d, and the order of acquisition of different irregula...

Overt or covert reference to the edges of constituents is a commonplace throughout phonology and morphology. Some examples include: •In English, Garawa, Indonesian and a number of other languages, the normal right-to-left

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.

The proposition that the mental lexicon is a `dual route' system, advanced by Pinker and others to account for regular and irregular morphology, overlooks the important fact that morphological regularity correlates inversely with phonological regularity --`regular' past-tense beeped being phonologically irregular (exceptional syllable), while `irregular' past-tense kept is phonologically just regular. I argue that the correlation, which is general, can only be captured under a single-rather than `dual'- architecture, and an associational-rather than rule based- theory of morphology. Where morphological associations are strong, morphology looks regular and phonological alternations are inhibited, making phonology look irregular. In a system in which regularities are attributed to `rules', rules should be able to coexist with other rules, and morphological and phonological regularities should correlate directly, rather than inversely. 1.

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

To what extent can Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) provide theoretical phonology a satisfactory formalization of markedness theory? This is a central question for linking OT and actual empirical patterns: � of Figure 6 in Chapter 2’s Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic Cognitive Architecture (ICS) map. Through several case studies, it is argued here that OT makes possible formal markedness-based explanations of both broad universal generalizations and complex language-particular patterns—provided the theory incorporates conjunctive constraint interaction. The nonderivational character of OT drives the development of a nonstandard type of constituent in phonological representations: the headed feature domain. The empirical realms investigated are

A characteristic feature of conservative varieties of Tokyo Japanese (Hibiya 1999) is the interaction of a morphophonemic process of compound voicing with a general allophonic process of g-weakening. Given the current interest in parallelist approaches to the masking of certain phonological generalizations on the surface (dubbed “opacity ” in Kiparsky 1973), the immediate goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this interaction represents a type of opacity that cannot be described in an adequate way by means of Sympathy (McCarthy 1998), which has been suggested as a general and strictly parallelist tool to deal with all types of opacity in Optimality Theory (henceforth, OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993). Mistakenly put forth as an argument for Sympathy in our own earlier work (Ito & Mester 1997b) the case receives a superior understanding under familiar conservative assumptions, where the opacity arises naturally out of the serial interaction of the lexical and postlexical modules of phonology. Construed more broadly, this result constitutes an additional argument for the weakly parallel architecture of Optimality Theory argued for in Ito & Mester (to appear a,b), which maintains lexical and postlexical phonology as different and serially connected systems, without necessarily embracing the entirely separate assumption of serially connected levels within the lexical phonology itself argued for by Kiparsky 1998.

This paper presents an analysis of the conjugational systems of West Germanic that highlights

The "phase" alternation in Rotuman is remarkable (and has attracted a good deal of previous attention) for two reasons. First, the shape differences between phases are quite diverse, involving resyllabification, deletion, umlaut, and metathesis. Second, the phase alternation produces prosodic structures that are otherwise unattested in this language, replacing simple (C)V syllables with closed and diphthongal ones. In this article, I argue that Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) helps to make sense of both these observations. I also go on to use these results to support some claims about the nature of templates and prosodic circumscription in the theory of Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1986).