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3 Underphonologization and modularity bias


 
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1. Title Title of document 3 Underphonologization and modularity bias - Phonological Argumentation
 
2. Creator Author's name, affiliation, country Elliott Moreton; University of North Carolina;
 
3. Subject Discipline(s) Linguistics
 
4. Subject Keyword(s) Phonetics; Phonology; Linguistics; OT; Optimality Theory; John McCarthy
 
5. Subject Subject classification Phonetics; Phonology
 
6. Description Abstract The most straightforward theory of how phonologization interacts with Universal Grammar to determine typology is that UG defines the cognitively possible grammars (‘hard’ typology), while phonologization determines how frequent they are (‘soft’ typology). This paper argues instead that some soft typology has a cognitive source, and proposes a formal explanation. Phonological patterns relating tone to tone are shown to be more common than those relating tone to voicing and aspiration (20 families on 5 continents versus 8 families on 4 continents). This soft typological fact cannot be derived from differential robustness of the phonetic precursors, which have similar magnitude (survey of 26 studies of 17 languages). A learning algorithm is proposed in which the learner chooses between Optimality-Theoretic constraint sets based on how probable they make the training data (‘Bayesian Constraint Addition’). This biases the learner towards phonologizing processes driven by ‘modular’ markedness constraints, i.e., ones that interact with few other constraints. Its application to the tone case is illustrated by simulation, and compared with alternatives.
 
7. Publisher Organizing agency, location Equinox Publishing Ltd
 
8. Contributor Sponsor(s)
 
9. Date (YYYY-MM-DD) 01-Jan-2010
 
10. Type Status & genre Peer-reviewed Article
 
11. Type Type
 
12. Format File format PDF
 
13. Identifier Uniform Resource Identifier https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/books/article/view/29394
 
14. Identifier Digital Object Identifier 10.1558/equinox.29394
 
15. Source Journal/conference title; vol., no. (year) Equinox eBooks Publishing; Phonological Argumentation
 
16. Language English=en en
 
18. Coverage Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.)
 
19. Rights Copyright and permissions Copyright 2014 Equinox Publishing Ltd