[parislinguists] ENS, salle des Actes.7 avril 14h, conference de Bruce HAYES

[Jean-Louis AROUI]

> CONFERENCES  du DEC
>  
> Le DE C  et  le LSCP vous proposent :
>  
> 
> Jeudi 7 avril à 14h,
>  
> salle des Actes
> ENS, 45 rue d'Ulm, Paris, escalier A, 1er étage
>  
> 
> Stochastic phonological knowledge:
> general constraints, gradient ranking
>  
> Bruce Hayes
> UCLA
>  
> 
> Recent research has documented an ability of language learners to project
> statistical knowledge from the lexicon. Where the language contains competing
> morphological patterns (for example ~ vs. X ~ Xd past tenses in English, or
> competing verbal conjugation classes in Romance) language learners become
> tacitly aware of the relative lexical frequencies of the rival patterns.
> Supporting evidence comes from experiment: asked to inflect novel stems
> compatible with more than one pattern, speakers behave stochastically,
> adopting one or another pattern at random in frequencies matching the lexical
> frequencies.
>  
> This ability has been shown for opaque alternations (Zuraw 2001), conjugation
> class choice (Albright 2002), and projection of underlying representations
> (Ernestus and Baayen 2003). The present work extends this research line to a
> classical case of natural, transparent phonology, the vowel harmony system of
> Hungarian. A formal analysis using stochastic Optimality Theory is proposed,
> and it is demonstrated that the rankings are learnable using a combination of
> algorithms from the literature.
>  
> I conclude with data suggesting, tentatively but intriguingly, that language
> learners favor generalthat is, formally simpleconstraints. When the Hungarian
> system is modeled using constraints that are too detailed, the result is a
> better match to the training set, but a worse match to native speaker
> intuitions. The suggested conclusion is that the speakers learn a grammar that
> diverges somewhat from the input data pattern, in the direction of greater
> generality.
>  

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