I have not had time to blog in a while, and I really don’t have much time now either. But here is a quick note (one of several, I anticipate) about the past tense debate.<\/p>\r\n
It is common to talk as if connectionist approaches and dual-route models are the two opposing approaches to morphological irregularity, when in fact there are three\u00a0<\/em>approaches. Linguists since at least Bloch (1947)1<\/sup> have claimed that regular, irregular, and semiregular patterns are all rule-governed and ontologically alike. Of course, the irregular and semiregular rules may require some degree lexical conditioning, but phonologists have rightly<\/strong> never seen this as some kind of defect or scandal. Chomsky & Halle (1968), Halle (1977), Rubach (1984), and Halle & Mohanan (1985) all spend quite a bit of space developing these rules, using formalisms that should be accessible to any modern-day student of phonology. These rules all the way down<\/em> (henceforth RAWD) approaches are empirically adequate and have been implemented computationally with great success: some prominent instances include Yip & Sussman 1996, Albright & Hayes 2003,2<\/sup> and Payne 2022. It is malpractice to ignore these approaches.<\/p>\r\n One might think that RAWD has more in common with dual-route approaches than with connectionist thinking, but as Mark Liberman noted many years ago<\/a>, that is not obviously the case. Mark Seidenberg, for instance, one of the most prominent Old Connectionists, has argued that there is a tendency for regulars and irregulars to share certain structural similarities. To take one example, semi-regular slept<\/em>\u00a0does not look so different from\u00a0stepped<\/em>, and the many zero past tense forms (e.g., hit, bid<\/em>) end in the same phones\u2014[t, d]\u2014used to mark the plural. While I am not sure this is a meaningfuly generalization, it clearly is something that both connectionist and RAWD models can<\/strong> encode.3<\/sup> This is in contradistinction to dual-route models, which have no choice but to treat these observations as coincidences. Thus, as Mark notes, connectionists and RAWD proponents find themselves allied against dual-route models.<\/p>\r\n (Mark’s post, which I recommend, continues to draw a parallel between dual-routism and bi-uniqueness<\/a> which will amuse anyone interested in the history of phonology.)<\/p>\r\n Albright, A. and Hayes, B. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: a computational\/experimental study.\u00a0Cognition <\/em>90(2): 119-161. I have not had time to blog in a while, and I really don’t have much time now either. But here is a quick note (one of several, I anticipate) about the past tense debate. It is common to talk as if connectionist approaches and dual-route models are the two opposing approaches to morphological irregularity, … Continue reading “On the past tense debate; Part 1: the RAWD approach”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4,29,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acquisition","category-language","category-paste-tense-debate","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1608,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/1608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Endnotes<\/h1>\r\n
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References<\/h1>\r\n
Bloch, B. 1947. English verb inflection.\u00a0Language\u00a0<\/em>23(4): 399-418.
Chomsky, N., and Halle, M. 1968.\u00a0Sound Pattern of English<\/em>. Harper & Row.
Halle, M. 1977. Tenseness, vowel shift and the phonology of back vowels in Modern English.\u00a0Linguistic Inquiry<\/em> 8(4): 611-625.
Halle, M., and Mohanan, K. P. 1985.\u00a0Segmental phonology of Modern English. Linguistic Inquiry<\/em> 16(1): 57-116.
Myers, S. 1987. Vowel shortening in English.\u00a0Natural Language & Linguistic Theory<\/em> 5(4): 485-518.
Payne, S. R. 2022. When collisions are a good thing: the acquisition of morphological marking. Bachelor’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania.\u00a0
Pinker, S. 1999.\u00a0Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language<\/em>. Basic Books.
Rubach, J. 1984. Segmental rules of English and cyclic phonology. Language<\/em> 60(1): 21-54.
Yip, K., and Sussman, G. J. 1997. Sparse representations for fast, one-shot learning. In Proceedings of the 14th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and 9th Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence<\/em>, pages 521-527.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"