Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T15:24:00.618Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Phonotactics as phonology: knowledge of a complex restriction in Dutch*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2012

René Kager  and
Joe Pater
René Kager
Affiliation:
University of Utrecht
Joe Pater
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster whose second member is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighbourhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on speakers' judgements when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes & Wilson's (2008) maximum entropy model of phonotactics, using constraints that go beyond the complexity permitted by their model of constraint induction.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , May 2012 , pp. 81 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Albright, Adam (2009). Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability. Phonology 26. 9–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anttila, Arto (2008). Gradient phonotactics and the Complexity Hypothesis. NLLT 26. 695–729.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harold (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harold, Piepenbrock, Richard & Gulikers, Leon (1995). The CELEX lexical database. Release 2. [CD-ROM.] Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Bailey, Todd M. & Hahn, Ulrike (2001). Determinants of wordlikeness: phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods? Journal of Memory and Language 44. 568–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas M. & Maechler, Martin (2010). Package ‘lme4’ (Version 0.999375-34): linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. Available (December 2011) at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/lme4.pdf.Google Scholar
Berent, Iris, Everett, Daniel L. & Shimron, Joseph (2001). Do phonological representations specify variables? Evidence from the Obligatory Contour Principle. Cognitive Psychology 42. 1–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berent, Iris & Shimron, Joseph (1997). The representation of Hebrew words: evidence from the Obligatory Contour Principle. Cognition 64. 39–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2009). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 5.1.05). http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Booij, Geert (1995). The phonology of Dutch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Burnham, Kenneth P. & Anderson, David R. (2002). Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach. 2nd edn.New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Byrd, Richard H., Lu, Peihuang, Nocedal, Jorge & Zhu, Ciyou (1995). A limited memory algorithm for bound constrained optimization. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 16. 1190–1208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Coetzee, Andries W. (2009). Grammar is both categorical and gradient. In Parker, Steve (ed.) Phonological argumentation: essays on evidence and motivation. London: Equinox. 9–42.Google Scholar
Coetzee, Andries W. & Pater, Joe (2006). Lexically ranked OCP-Place constraints in Muna. Ms, University of Michigan & University of Massachusetts Amherst. Available as ROA-842 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Coetzee, Andries W. & Pater, Joe (2008). Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic. NLLT 26. 289–337.Google Scholar
Cohen, A., Ebeling, C. L., Fokkema, K. & van Holk, A. F. G. (1971). Fonologie van het Nederlands en het Fries. The Hague: Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Coleman, John & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1997). Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability. In Coleman, John (ed.) Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology. Somerset, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics. 49–56.Google Scholar
Daland, Robert, Hayes, Bruce, White, James, Garellek, Marc, Davis, Andrea & Norrmann, Ingrid (2011). Explaining sonority projection effects. Phonology 28. 197–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Large, Nathan R. & Pisoni, David B. (2000). Perception of wordlikeness: effects of segment probability and length on the processing of nonwords. Journal of Memory and Language 42. 481–496.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frisch, Stefan A., Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Broe, Michael B. (2004). Similarity avoidance and the OCP. NLLT 22. 179–228.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A. & Zawaydeh, Bushra Adnan (2001). The psychological reality of OCP-place in Arabic. Lg 77. 91–106.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. & Jenkins, James J. (1964). Studies in the psychological correlates of the sound system of American English. Word 20. 157–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groot, A. W. de (1931). De wetten der phonologie en hun betekenis voor de studie van het Nederlands. Nieuwe Taalgids 25. 225–243.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos (1993). The Dutch foot and the chanted call. JL 29. 37–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos (2009). Vowel duration, syllable quantity, and stress in Dutch. In Hanson, Kristin & Inkelas, Sharon (eds.) The nature of the word: studies in honor of Paul Kiparsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 181–198.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (2004). Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: the early stages. In Kager, et al. (2004). 158–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin (2008). A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. LI 39. 379–440.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce, Zuraw, Kie, Siptár, Péter & Londe, Zsuzsa (2009). Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmony. Lg 85. 822–863.Google Scholar
Hulst, Harry van der (1984). Syllable structure and stress in Dutch. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaeger, T. Florian (2008). Categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 59. 434–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jurafsky, Daniel & Martin, James H. (2000). Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Kager, René (1989). A metrical theory of stress and destressing in English and Dutch. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) (2004). Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kager, René & Zonneveld, Wim (1986). Schwa, syllables, and extrametricality in Dutch. The Linguistic Review 5. 197–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kullback, S. & Leibler, R. A. (1951). On information and sufficiency. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 22. 79–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luce, R. Duncan (1959). Individual choice behavior: a theoretical analysis. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Martin, Andrew (2011). Grammars leak: modeling how phonotactic generalizations interact within the grammar. Lg 87. 751–770.Google Scholar
Moulton, William G. (1962). The vowels of Dutch: phonetic and distributional classes. Lingua 11. 294–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nooteboom, S. G. (1972). Production and perception of vowel duration: a study of the durational properties of vowels in Dutch. PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht.Google Scholar
Ohala, John J. (1986). Consumer's guide to evidence in phonology. Phonology Yearbook 3. 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ohala, John J. & Ohala, Manjari (1986). Testing hypotheses regarding the psychological manifestation of morpheme structure constraints. In Ohala, John J. & Jaeger, Jeri (eds.) Experimental phonology. Orlando: Academic Press. 239–252.Google Scholar
Oostendorp, Marc van (2000). Phonological projection: a theory of feature content and prosodic structure. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Joe (to appear). Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints. Lg.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe & Tessier, Anne-Michelle (2006). L1 phonotactic knowledge and the L2 acquisition of alternations. In Slabakova, Roumyana, Montrul, Silvina A. & Prévost, Philippe (eds.) Inquiries in linguistic development: studies in honor of Lydia White. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 115–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (2003). Probabilistic phonology: discrimination and robustness. In Bod, Rens, Hay, Jennifer & Jannedy, Stefanie (eds.) Probabilistic linguistics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 177–228.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Tesar, Bruce (2004). Learning phonotactic distributions. In Kager, et al. (2004). 245–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team (2010). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at http://www.r-project.org.Google Scholar
Rietveld, A. C. M. & van Heuven, V. J. (2009). Algemene fonetiek. 3rd edn.Bussum: Coutinho.Google Scholar
Rietveld, A. C. M., Kerkhoff, J. & Gussenhoven, Carlos (2004). Word prosodic structure and vowel duration in Dutch. JPh 32. 349–371.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine (2006). Harmony optimization and the computational architecture of the mind/brain. In Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine (eds.) The harmonic mind: from neural computation to optimality-theoretic grammar. Vol. 1: Cognitive architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 3–62.Google Scholar
Trommelen, Mieke (1984). The syllable in Dutch, with special reference to diminutive formation. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Wilson, Colin & Obdeyn, Marieke (2009). Simplifying subsidiary theory: statistical evidence from Arabic, Muna, Shona and Wargamay. Ms, Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar