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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Emergent Systemic Simplicity (And Complexity), Joe Pater
Emergent Systemic Simplicity (And Complexity), Joe Pater
Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series
Across phonology and syntax, the typological probability of one structure being present in a linguistic system often depends on other related aspects of that system. For example, voiced [g] is more probable in a language if it contains voiced [b] than if it does not, and a left-headed PP is more probable in a language that contains left-headed VPs than in one that has right-headed VPs. These dependencies can be seen as preferences for systemic simplicity, for uniform expression of laryngeal contrasts across place, and for uniform syntactic headedness. Both the systemic and the probabilistic nature of these generalizations pose …
Phonotactics As Phonology: Knowledge Of A Complex Restriction In Dutch, René Krager, Joe Pater
Phonotactics As Phonology: Knowledge Of A Complex Restriction In Dutch, René Krager, Joe Pater
Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series
The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster, where the second member of the cluster 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 neighborhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on judgments when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes and Wilson's Maximum Entropy model …