New Paper: Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in phonology
Andries Coetzee has published a new paper in Language, the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America.
Coetzee, Andries W. 2008. Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in
phonology. Language, 84(2):218-257.
Abstract
In this paper, I make two theoretical claims: (i) For some form to be
grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy
all constraints that are active in L – i.e. even grammatical forms can
violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality – i.e.
not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show
that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture
of an Optimality Theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound
patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test
the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech
processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on
the processing of non-words of the form [stVt], [skVk] and [spVp] in
English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both
claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments.