Phonology III: Grammatical Judgments in Phonology and Beyond

Phonology III: Grammatical judgments in phonology and beyond

Shigeto Kawahara

1 Requirements

• Participation (20%) • Presentation of two papers (20%) • Presentation of a term project (both interim and ﬁnal) (10%) • Final paper, ideally with an experimental/corpus-based component (50%)

2 Goals

The Generative Enterprise has been primarily using an intuition-based approach for data collection. Theories are usually built based on a grammatical vs. ungrammatical distinction, which itself relies on “native-speakers’ intuition”. In this class, we are going to study a growing body of literature that tries to improve upon this tradition.

3 Format

This is a pro-seminor class, and hence is primarily discussion-based rather than lecture-based. It is therefore crucial that you read all the reading assignments before class.

4 Topics

4.1 An overview: Dangers of an intuition-based approach An overview of the problems of an intuition-based approach. Reading for discussion: Ohala (1986); Kawahara (2011a)

4.2 Generalizability On average, how many speakers provide the data for a standard phonology paper? How many items are considered to be sufﬁcient? This part of the discussion is based on your search. You will go ﬁnd some published papers and answer these questions. Maybe we could compare different journals?

1 • Japanese mimetic palatalization (Mester & Itˆo(1989); Zoll (1997) vs. Alderete & Kochetov (2009))

4.3 (Non-)productivity Phonologists sometime tend to “overuse” the data, i.e. use highly morphologized, exception-full, non-productive data to build a phonological theory. We will consider several examples of this sort.

• Polish raising and opacity (Lubowicz (2003) vs.Sanders (2003)) (You don’t have to read Lubowicz. *Sanders 2003 to be presented by Vandana)

• Lyman’s Law (Vance (1980))

• English velar softening (Pierrehumbert (2006)) (to be presented by Jeremy)

4.4 Mixing up phonological and phonetic patterns Some productive cases that phonologists use to build their theories may involve gradient, phonetic patterns.

• English stop epenthesis (Fourakis & Port, 1986) (*to be presented by Sara)

• English [l] velarization in coda (Sproat & Fujimura, 1993) (*to be presented by a Ryan)

• English phrasal nasal assimilation (Gow, 2002; Nolan, 1992)

Are there any productive phonological patterns?

“I occasionally wondered, ‘Where is the normal phonology that I was trained to study?”’ (Hayes 1995: 68).

4.5 Bias Can theoretically-oriented linguists produce unbiased data? (Dabrowska, 2010; Gibson & Fe- dorenko, 2010)?

Student presentation: Spender (1973) and Cordaro & Ison (1963) (Sara)

4.6 Beyond a grammatical/ungrammatical dichotomy Can we really consider some form to be grammatical and some other ungrammatical, and that’s it? Consider the following classic paradigm: brick, blick, bnick. But how about bnick vs nbik? (Coetzee, 2009).

Student presentation: Armstrong et al. (1983) (Vandana)

2 4.7 Frequency and Gradiency Maybe our phonological knowledge is stochastic (Frisch et al., 2004; Hayes & Londe, 2006).

Also lexical frequencies seem to affect some phonological patterns. How can we model the frequency effects? (Coetzee & Kawahara, 2010)

4.8 Overcoming the problems: Judgment studies So what can we do? (Kawahara, 2011b, 2010).

Also a rebuttal (Sprouse & Almeida, 2010) (to be presented by Ryan)

Also (Goldrick, to appear) (Focus on section 2 and on—to be presented by Jeremy)

4.9 Some practical skills Online experimentation? Stats?

4.10 Student presentation Presentation of their ﬁnal projects.

5 Quotes for discussion today

All quotes below are from Phillips (2009). Generative theories appear to rest on a weak empirical foundation, due to the reliance on informally gathered grammaticality judgments. [...] A set of standards [...] should be established. If these [...] ideas were considered, linguistic developments might once again be relevant to the psycholinguistic enterprise. (Ferreira 2005, p. 365) Judgments are inherently unreliable because of their unavoidable meta- cognitive over- tones, because grammaticality is better described as a graded quantity, and for a host of other reasons. (Edelman & Christianson 2003, p. 60) One might in fact conclude that we have not yet developed a means to evaluate empirical bases for hypotheses in generative grammar that is compelling enough to the majority of the practitioners. An evaluation of a given hypothesis thus tends to have an arbitrary aspect to it, inﬂuenced by such factors as whether or not the terms and concepts utilized are taken from a theory currently in fashion ... (Hoji & Ueyama 2007, p. 2) Unfortunately, the ﬁndings of the experimentalists in linguistics very rarely play a role in the work of generative grammarians. Rather, theory development tends to follow its own course, tested only by the unreliable and sometimes malleable intuitions of the theorists themselves. The theories are consequently of questionable relevance to the facts of language. (Wasow & Arnold 2005, p. 495)

3 Studies of usage as well as intuitive judgments have shown that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed, because (1) they seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility by ignoring the effects of multiple conflicting for- mal, semantic, and contextual constraints, and (2) they may reflect probability instead of grammaticality. (Bresnan 2007, p. 75)

References

Alderete, John & Alexei Kochetov (2009) Japanese mimetic palatalization revisited: Implications for conﬂicting directionality. Phonology 26(3): 369–388. Armstrong, Sharon Lee, Lila Gleitman, & Henry Gleason (1983) What some concepts might not be. Cognition 13: 263–308. Coetzee, Andries W. (2009) Grammar is both categorical and gradient. In Phonological Argumen- tation: Essays on Evidence and Motivation, Steve Parker, ed., London: Equinox, 9–42. Coetzee, Andries W. & Shigeto Kawahara (2010) Frequency and other biases in phonological variation. Ms. Michigan University and Rutgers University (submitted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory). Cordaro, Lucian & James Ison (1963) Psychology of the scientist: X Observer bias in classical conditioning of the planarian. Psychological Reports 13: 787–789. Dabrowska, Ewa (2010) Naive vs. expert intuitions: An empirical study of acceptability judgments. The Linguistic Review 27(1): 1–23. Fourakis, M. & R. Port (1986) Stop epenthesis in English. Journal of Phonetics 14: 197–221. Frisch, Stephan, Janet Pierrehumbert, & Michael Broe (2004) Similarity avoidance and the OCP. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22: 179–228. Gibson, Edward & Evelina Fedorenko (2010) Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(6): 233–234. Goldrick, Matthew (to appear) Utilizing psychological realism to advance phonological theory. In The handbook of phonological theory II, John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, & Alan Yu, eds., Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley. Gow, David (2002) Does English coronal place assimilation create lexical ambiguity? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 28: 163–179. Hayes, Bruce (1995) On what to teach the Undergraduates: Some Changing Orthodoxies in Phono- logical Theory. Linguistics in the Morning Calm 3: 59–77. Hayes, Bruce & Zsuzsa Londe (2006) Stochastic phonological knowledge: The case of Hungarian vowel harmony. Phonology 23: 59–104. Kawahara, Shigeto (2010) Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing. Ms. Rutgers University (submitted for publication in Journal of East Asian Linguistics). Kawahara, Shigeto (2011a) Experimental approaches in theoretical phonology. In The Blackwell companion to phonology, Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, & Keren Rice, eds., Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley. Kawahara, Shigeto (2011b) Japanese loanword devoicing revisited: A wellformedness judgment study. Natural language and Linguistic Theory . Lubowicz, Anna (2003) Contrast Preservation in Phonological Mappings. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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