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Title:
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Inductive Learning of Phonotactic Patterns
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Author:
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Jeffrey Heinz
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.ling.udel.edu/heinz/
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Degree Awarded:
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University of California, Los Angeles
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2007
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Phonology
Typology
Language Acquisition
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Director(s):
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Kie Zuraw
Bruce Hayes
Colin Wilson
Stott Parker
Edward Stabler
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Abstract:
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This dissertation demonstrates that significant classes of phonotactic
patterns---patterns found over contiguous sounds, patterns found over
non-contiguous segments (i.e. long distance agreement), and stress
patterns---belong to small subsets of logically possible patterns whose
defining properties naturally provide inductive principles learners can use
to generalize correctly from limited experience.
This result is obtained by studying the hypothesis spaces different
formulations of locality in phonology naturally define in the realm of
regular languages, that is, those patterns describable with finite state
machines. Locality expressed as contiguity (adjacency) restrictions
provides the basis for n-gram-based patterns which describe phonotactic
patterns over contiguous segments. Locality expressed as precedence---where
distance between segments is not measured at all---defines a hypothesis
space for long distance agreement patterns. Finally, both of these
formulations of locality are shown to be subsumed by a more general
formulation---that each relevant phonological environment is defined
`locally' and is unique---which I call neighborhood-distinctness.
In addition to patterns over contiguous and non-contiguous segments, it is
shown that all stress patterns described in recent comprehensive typologies
are, for small neighborhoods, neighborhood-distinct. In fact, it is shown
that 414 out of the 422 languages in the typologies have stress patterns
which are neighborhood-distinct for even smaller neighborhoods called
`1-1'. Furthermore, it is shown that significant classes of logically
possible unattested patterns do not. Thus, 1-1 neighborhood-distinctness is
hypothesized to be a universal property of phonotactic patterns, a
hypothesis confirmed for all but a few stress patterns which merit further
study.
It is shown that there are learners which provably learn these hypothesis
spaces in the sense of Gold (1967) and which exemplify two general classes
of learners : string extension and state merging. Thus the results obtained
here provide techniques which allow other hypothesis spaces possibly
relevant to phonology, or other cognitive domains, to be explored. Also,
the hypothesis spaces and learning procedures developed here provide a
basis which can be enriched with additional, substantive phonological
structure. Finally, this basis is readily transferable into a variety of
statistical learning procedures.
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