04 Feb 2005

Andrew Wedel (University of Arizona)

Generative models of phonology account for output patterns through a complex grammar algorithm applied over a passive lexicon. However, many complex patterns in the natural world can be successfully explained as the gradual accumulation of structure through repeated local interactions (Nicolis & Prigogine 1977).

Language change often proceeds by analogy, where the more similar two forms are, the more likely they are to become more similar in some other respect (e.g., Bybee 1985). A range of models account for these observations based on the premise that 1) even predictably derivable output forms can be represented in the lexicon (Butterworth 1983, Tenpenny 1995, Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder 1997), and 2) that all forms in the mental lexicon are associated in a web of connections, where the strength of each connection depends in part on similarity (cf. Chandler, in press). Under these models, differential connection strengths between lexical items can feed language change, for example, by differentially biasing production or perception errors. Here, I show that when similarity-dependent connections between lexical entries probabilistically influence lexical output form, patterns described by the Optimality Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) principles of (i) constraint dominance, and (ii) strict constraint dominance rapidly arise, driven by competition between leveling pressures within the lexicon and differentiating pressures from lexicon-external performance biases. Importantly, this model predicts that even if performance biases are additive (as seems desirable if markedness is grounded in the physical properties of articulation, perception, and processing), they may yet be manifested in lexical patterns as if they were not. Further, the model predicts occasional entrenchment of fortuitous, 'unnatural' patterns through analogical extension (cf. Garrett and Blevins, in press).

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