English speakers, it is said (Halle 1978), know that [blɪk] is a “possible” word in their language (though Blick means ‘glance’ in German), but [bniːn] and [mgla] are not (even though the former means ‘delicious’ in Maltese and the latter means ‘darkness’ in Russian). The theory of phonotactics is concerned with the origin and nature of these language-specific intuitions.
In this class, we will review and critique theories of phonotactic knowledge and the experimental methods used to study it. According to one tradition, phonotactic knowledge reflects speakers’ knowledge of morpheme structure constraints (MSCs), redundancy rules over underlying representations; according to another—strongly associated with Optimality Theory and its forebears — it reflects surface structure constraints. Is one account preferable, or are both needed? Does phonotactic knowledge reflect prosodic structures like the syllable (cf. Pierrehumbert 1994, Blevins 2003) or putative universals like sonority sequencing (Daland et al. 2011)? What role do phonological processes play (e.g., Kisseberth 2011, Paster 2013, Durvasula and Kahng 2015)? Are wordlikeness intuitions influenced by similarity to existing words (e.g., Bailey and Hahn 2001, Hayes and Wilson 2008, Albright 2009)? What evidence can be gleaned from loanword adaptation (e.g., Peperkamp 2005, Daland et al. 2019) or sound change (e.g., Iverson and Salmons 2005)?
Schedule (always subject to change)
Monday: Background; morpheme structure constraints
Halle 1978, Stanley 1967:§1–2
Tuesday: Surface structure constraints
Kager 1999:§1.5–7, Paster 2013
(Kisseberth 2011, Durvasula and Kahng 2015)
Wednesday: The syllable and sonority
Pierrehumbert 1994, Blevins 2003, Daland et al. 2011
Thursday: Wordlikeness
Bailey and Hahn 2001, Hayes and Wilson 2008, Gorman 2013: ch. 2
(Zimmer 1969, Albright 2009, Kostyszyn and Heinz 2022)
Friday: Further evidence
Iverson and Salmons 2005, Peperkamp 2005, Daland et al. 2019
Selected references
Albright, Adam. 2009. Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability. Phonology 9–41.
Bailey, Todd M., and Ulrike Hahn. 2001. Determinants of wordlikeness: phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods. Journal of Memory and Language 44:586–591.
Blevins, Juliette. 2003. The independent nature of phonotactic constraints: An alternative to syllable-based approaches. In The Syllable in Optimality Theory, ed. Caroline Féry and Ruben van de Vijver, 375–403. Cambridge University Press.
Daland, Robert, Bruce Hayes, James White, Marc Garellek, Andrea Davis, and Ingrid Norrmann. 2011. Explaining sonority projection effects. Phonology 28:197–234.
Daland, Robert, Mira Oh, and Lisa Davidson. 2019. On the relation between speech perception and loanword adaptation: Cross-linguistic perception of korean-illicit word-median clusters. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 37:825–868.
Durvasula, Karthik, and Jimin Kahng. 2015. Illusory vowels in perceptual epenthesis: The role of phonological alternations. Phonology 32:385–416.
Gorman, Kyle. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Halle, Morris. 1978. Knowledge unlearned and untaught: what speakers know about the
sounds of their language. In Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality, ed. Morris Halle, Joan Bresnan, and George A. Miller, 294–303. MIT Press.
Hayes, Bruce, and Colin Wilson. 2008. A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotacticlearning. Linguistic Inquiry 39:379–440.
Iverson, Gregory K., and Joseph C. Salmons. 2005. Filling the gap: English tense vowel plus final /š/. Journal of English Linguistics 33:1–15.
Kager, René. 1999. Optimality Theory. Cambridge University Press.
Kisseberth, Charles W. 2011. Conspiracies. In Blackwell Companion to Phonology, ed. Marc van Oostendorp, 1644–1665. Wiley-Blackwell.
Kostyszyn, Kalina, and Jeffrey Heinz. 2022. Categorical account of gradient acceptability of
word-initial polish onsets. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Phonology.
Paster, Mary. 2013. Rethinking the ‘duplication problem’. Lingua 126:78–91.
Peperkamp, Sharon. 2005. A psycholinguistic theory of loanword adaptation. In Proceedings of the 30th Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 341–352.
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1994. Syllable structure and word structure: a study of triconsonantal clusters in English. In Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form: Papers in Laboratory
Phonology III , ed. Patricia A. Keating, 168–188. Cambridge University Press.
Stanley, Richard. 1967. Redundancy rules in phonology. Language 43:393–436.
Zimmer, Karl E. 1969. Psychological correlates of some Turkish morpheme structure conditions. Language 45:309–321.