University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses November 2016 Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, and Exceptions Aleksei I. Nazarov University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Computational Linguistics Commons, and the Phonetics and Phonology Commons Recommended Citation Nazarov, Aleksei I., "Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, and Exceptions" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 782. https://doi.org/10.7275/9054817.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/782 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EXTENDING HIDDEN STRUCTURE LEARNING: FEATURES, OPACITY, AND EXCEPTIONS A Dissertation Presented By ALEKSEI IOULEVITCH NAZAROV Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2016 Linguistics © Copyright by Aleksei Ioulevitch Nazarov 2016 All Rights Reserved EXTENDING HIDDEN STRUCTURE LEARNING: FEATURES, OPACITY, AND EXCEPTIONS A Dissertation Presented By ALEKSEI IOULEVITCH NAZAROV Approved as to style and content by ___________________________________ Joe Pater, Co-Chair ___________________________________ Gaja Jarosz, Co-Chair ___________________________________ John McCarthy, Member ___________________________________ Kristine Yu, Member ___________________________________ David Smith, Member ___________________________________ John Kingston, Department Head Department of Linguistics DEDICATION For my parents, Elena and Yuli. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation co-chairs, Gaja Jarosz and Joe Pater, for their patience, guidance, and support in the process of writing this dissertation. I am very grateful to Gaja for being willing to take the responsibility of becoming my co-chair in her first year of joining the UMass faculty, and my last year as a UMass graduate student. I would like to thank her for her enormous encouragement as well as her constructive criticism, and for opening my mind onto new perspectives and teaching me how to better articulate my thoughts. Without the many things that I learned from her in the course of this one year, this dissertation would not have taken the course it has taken now. I am especially thankful to Joe for helping me realize that I wanted to do computational phonology by encouraging me to explore this direction since my first year of graduate school. I am also very thankful to him as a teacher: the thoughts and ideas that came out of his courses will always stay with me; he has taught me to always be curious for the road not taken. His flexibility and guidance in the process of shaping this dissertation have been invaluable. Without exaggeration, I can say that without this, this dissertation would not exist at all. I would also like to thank John McCarthy for his patience, wisdom, and sense of humor. Working with him throughout my time as a graduate student has taught me to be infinitely more critical of my own thinking and writing. I will never forget the anecdotes and pieces of wisdom that he shared during meetings and classes, and I thank him for being generous in everything. v Kristine Yu deserves my special thanks for her encouragement and guidance, especially in the project that led to chapter 2 of this dissertation. I am very thankful to her for teaching me be more clear and precise, and for broadening my horizons with literature and perspectives I was completely unaware of before. I would like to thank David Smith for being very supportive and flexible, and for his very valuable comments on various instantiations of the projects explored in this dissertation. I learned many things about matters both computational and linguistic – things that will also help me to keep growing in the future. Brian Dillon and John Kingston have also been very important in the process of developing this dissertation, and I am very grateful for their help and support. Brian Dillon co-advised the project that led to chapter 2 of this dissertation. I would like to thank him for guiding me through my first steps in developing a computational learning project, for his support, for his inspiring ideas, and for all his help with both technical and linguistic questions in this project. In the early stages of exploring dissertation themes, I considered an experimental phonology project, with John Kingston as the prospective chair of the committee. I would like to thank John for his commitment and support, and for his help with experiment design and recording stimuli. I am very grateful for all that I learned from him during this process. I am very grateful to all of the UMass faculty for these 6 years of growth and learning. Apart from those whose name I have already mentioned, I would also like to especially thank Rajesh Bhatt, Lisa Green, Alice Harris, Kyle Johnson, Angelika Kratzer, Tom Roeper, and Ellen Woolford, who I have learned incredibly much from either in class or in person. I would also like to thank David Huber, Alexandra Jesse, Andrew vi McCallum, and Erik Learned-Miller for their courses that exponentiated my knowledge of modeling from various angles and perspectives, and that gave me the tools that make me not ashamed to call myself a computational phonologist. I would like to thank Marc van Oostendorp for being my first advisor at Leiden University. He has always supported and encouraged me to continue my path in linguistics, and I would like to thank him for being a true inspiration, both as a linguist and as a person. I would also like to thank all other linguistics faculty at Leiden University for all that I have learned from them and for their support, in particular, Lisa Cheng, Crit Cremers, and Claartje Levelt. I would like to thank all the wonderful colleagues who have commented on various parts of this work throughout the years, in particular, Adam Albright, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Paul Boersma, Jeroen Breteler, Lisa Davidson, Brian Dillon, David Erschler, Silke Hamann, Ivy Hauser, Coral Hughto, Martin Krämer, John Kingston, John McCarthy, Marc van Oostendorp, Joe Pater, Presley Pizzo, Clàudia Pons-Moll, Olivier Rizzolo, Klaas Seinhorst, Robert Staubs, Peter Svenonius, and Kristine Yu, and audiences at UMass Amherst, the University of Tromsø, Leiden University, the University of Manchester, the LSA Annual Meeting in Washington. I would also like to thank the National Science Foundation for supporting the work that led to chapter 3 of this dissertation through grants BCS-0813829 and BCS- 1424007. For rescuing me time and time again, I am deeply indebted to Kathy Adamczyk, Sarah Vega-Liros, Tom Maxfield, and Michelle McBride. Thank you for keeping our vii department running, thank you for your company and moral support, and thank you for your incredible flexibility and resourcefulness. The UMass linguistics department has been a place of contemplation, ideas, and wonderful connections with people. I would like to thank all my amazing fellow graduate students, and I would especially like to thank my cohort – Tracy Conner, Nick LaCara, and Yangsook Park. I would also like to thank the community of phonologists at UMass for the stimulating discussions and fun get-togethers, especially Ivy Hauser, Coral Hughto, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Presley Pizzo, Brandon Prickett, Brian Smith, and Robert Staubs. I would like to thank David Erschler for being a true friend, and for putting up with my rants about cooking shows and pulp culture. I am also really thankful to Claire Moore-Cantwell for our conversations about life, music and phonology. I would like to thank Rodica Ivan, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Nick LaCara, Robert Staubs, and Katya Vostrikova for being amazing roommates and friends throughout the years. A big thank you also to Caroline Andrews, Thuy Bui, Seda Kan, Stefan Keine, Deniz Özyıldız, and Brian Smith for being kind, supportive, and otherwise wonderful human beings. I am also very grateful for the support I have gotten from my colleagues outside of this department. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Becker, Gašper Beguš, Clàudia Pons-Moll, Kevin Schluter, Xico Torres-Tamarit, Asia Zaleska for being truly supportive and kind, and generally amazing. I would like to thank Mirjam de Jonge not only for being an amazing friend in general, but also for being my longest-standing friend in linguistics – we met during a linguistics course that we took when we were still in secondary school, and we’re both still at it. viii I am especially indebted to all the friends that I was fortunate to make in this area outside of linguistics, in particular to Anthony, Bobby, Charlie, Ilya, Julian, Jordan, Megan, and Zarina. I would not have been able to do this without your support, and you know I mean it. Thank you for all you have taught me throughout these years. All my friends from elsewhere, you know who you are, thank you for always being there for me; and thank you especially to Bernard, Hannah, Ilia, Inas, Jacco, Jacob, James, Joram, Karima, Lai, Maarten, Nate, and Qimin. I am immensely grateful to Mallorie Chernin and the Amherst College Choral Society for teaching me so much as a human being and as a singer, and to Mark Swanson for giving me the opportunity to be a soloist in his Rodgers and Hammerstein project. I am also very thankful to the Amherst College Russian Club, and Maria, Nina, and Evgenia for organizing our weekly tea with music and singing. It has truly been an amazing time. My parents deserve much more gratitude than this page can contain. To my father, Yuli, I am incredibly thankful for teaching me how to think, to be critical, and to persevere; for always supporting me in my decision to go to the US, and for giving me advice from academic to academic.