1. Comments
Kie Zuraw

2. Difference between Becker & Smith cases
Becker: Turkish, Egyptian Arabic
emphasis on idiosyncratic properties of each affix & each allomorph
each allomorph of each affix has its own gatekeeper grammar (source), and grammar proper (product)
language-wide behavior can be enforced through priors on constraint weights
Smith: English
emphasis on language-wide phonotactics
affix differences more limited
each allomorph has one constraint, with a weight

3. Both analyses work well. Why?
Turkish, Egyptian Arabic cases involve highly productive morphology
lots of learning data
easy for morphological idiosyncrasies to get learned
English case involves rare morphology
learners have very little to go on
must rely on language-wide grammar

4. What would the sublexical learner do with English?
This learner is more powerful—what will it do in a case where the power may not be needed?
Train on Smith’s corpus of real words
Test on Smith’s three schematic experimental words

5. Results for testing data
caveat: I wasn’t able to get the *Clash constraint to recognize overlapping violations

6. Compare to humans corpus (Smith’s slides) experiment (Smith’s slides)
sublexical learner

7. Let’s take a look at the grammar learned
Remember, there are 8 sets of constraint weights
Gatekeeper weights for –alicious
what kinds of stems like to take –alicious
Grammar-proper weights for X-alicious
how good is X-alicious?
Likewise gatekeeper & grammar proper for –licious
…and for –athon
…and for –thon
We’ll compare pairs of these

8. Gatekeeper grammars for –alicious vs. -athon
Words that already have a hiatus and/or lapse (magnolia) don’t like to take –alicious
But there were very few such words, so we shouldn’t make too much of this

9. Gatekeeper grammars for –licious vs. –thon
Not much difference

10. Grammars proper for X-alicious vs. X-athon
X-alicious is more intolerant of hiatus and lapse
→ less schwa

11. Grammars proper for X-licious vs. X-thon
X-thon is more intolerant of clash
→ more schwa

12. Difference between the two analyses
Smith’s grammar puts difference between –(a)licious and – (a)thon in one place
weights of constraints for using each allomorph
Sublexical learner spreads the difference across…
*Hiatus (plain *[V][V] and *[lax][V])
*Lapse
*Clash
i.e., each morpheme gets to have its own level of (in)tolerance of these

13. Can the two approaches be unified?
First learn a grammar of language overall
Then, as Becker suggests, use its weights as priors on all the sub-grammar weights for sublexical learner
Turkish case
there’s so much affixed data that the priors won’t matter much
hence Becker’s successful analysis without priors
English case
there’s so little affixed data that the sub-grammar weights will stay very close to the priors
hence Smith’s successful analysis without sub-grammars

14. Division of labor
In general, how does a learner decide what is idiosyncratic and what is morpheme-specific?
Surely tapping is a general property of American English
… not a property of specific suffixes that happen to start with an unstressed vowel (patt-ing, seed-ed, port-able, food-aholic, palat-al…)
In the MaxEnt approach that both Becker and Smith adopt, it all depends on the prior
The grammar has to maximize the probability that it assigns to the observed data
but also minimize the deviations from prior constraint weights
Parameters on these priors (μs, σs) determine how costly it is to assign responsibility to the morpheme-specific grammars vs. the general grammar
Comparing productive, frequent morphology (Becker) to marginal morphology (Smith) could be what lets us figure this out