Unifying Phonotactics and Derived Environment Blocking through Prosodic Constraint Indexation

Unifying Phonotactics and Derived Environment Blocking through Prosodic Constraint Indexation

In typical forms of derived environment blocking, restrictions on segment sequences within a prosodic domain are weakened when the same segments span a prosodic juncture. In this paper, I argue that these patterns are accounted for by indexing markedness constraints to the spans of prosodic constituents. By setting domains for phonotactic restrictions, these prosodically-indexed constraints acc...

Cycles, Non-Derived-Environment Blocking, and Correspondence

Neorealism: Unifying Cognition and Environment

Recent trends in psychology have revealed increasing discontent toward representational explanations of behavior. However, whether these trends have the conceptual resources to address the full range of cognitive phenomena remains unclear. Here, I defend neorealism (Holt, 1914) as the missing philosophical link between radically embodied cognitive science and a more encompassing psychology. Neo...

The Locus of Exceptionality: Morpheme-Specific Phonology as Constraint Indexation

Morphemes often behave differently phonologically in ways that cannot be explained purely phonologically: one morpheme undergoes or triggers a process while another morpheme fails to undergo or trigger that process, even though the two are in all relevant respects indistinguishable. Piro syncope (Matteson 1965, Kisseberth 1970, Lin 1997) provides an example of such morpheme-specific phonology. ...

Phonotactics as phonology: Knowledge of a complex constraint in Dutch

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 shows that t...