Pater, Joe
Loading...
Email Address
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Professor, Department of Linguistics
Last Name
Pater
First Name
Joe
Discipline
Linguistics
Expertise
Phonology, acquisition
Introduction
I work on phonology (the sound systems of language) and on the acquisition of phonology. My current research focuses on the use of weighted constraints for the modeling of phonology and its learning.
Name
16 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 16
Publication Publication Balantak metathesis and theories of possible repair in Optimality Theory(2003-01-01) Pater, JoePublication Austronesian Nasal Substitution and other NC Effects(1999) Pater, JoePublication The Locus of Exceptionality: Morpheme-Specific Phonology as Constraint Indexation(2007) Pater, JoeMorphemes often behave differently phonologically in ways that cannot be explained purely phonologically: one morpheme undergoes or triggers a process while another morpheme fails to undergo or trigger that process, even though the two are in all relevant respects indistinguishable. Piro syncope (Matteson 1965, Kisseberth 1970, Lin 1997) provides an example of such morpheme-specific phonology. Morphemes differ in whether they cause the preceding vowel to delete (/heta+nu/ [hetanu] Ogoing to seeP vs. /heta+lu/ [hetlu] Osee itP), and in whether they undergo deletion themselves (/meyi+wa+lu/ [meyiwlu] OcelebrationP vs. /heta+wa+lu/ [hetawalu] Ogoing to see him yetP). As the behavior of the homophonous pair of /-wa/ morphemes illustrates, morphemes that fail to condition syncope can differ in whether they undergo the process.Publication Austronesian Nasal Substitution Revisited(2001) Pater, JoePublication Emergent Contrast in Agent-Based Modeling of Language(2015) Pater, Joe; Staubs, RobertPublication Weighted Constraints in Generative Linguistics(2009) Pater, JoeHarmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly because they allow for the adaptation of connectionist and statistical models. HG has been little studied in generative linguistics, however, largely due to influential claims that weighted constraints make incorrect predictions about the typology of natural languages, predictions that are not shared by the more popular OT. This paper makes the case that HG is in fact a promising framework for typological research, and reviews and extends the existing arguments for weighted over ranked constraints.Publication Phonotactics as Phonology: Knowledge of a Complex Restriction in Dutch(2012) Krager, René; Pater, JoeThe Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster, where the second member of the cluster is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighborhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on judgments when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes and Wilson's Maximum Entropy model of phonotactics, using constraints that go beyond the complexity permitted by their model of constraint induction.Publication Balantak Metathesis and Theories of Possible Repair in Optimality Theory(2003) Pater, JoePublication Learning a Stratified Grammar(2005) Pater, JoePhonological processes and structures are often limited to a particular set of a language’s words, such as loanwords, Latinate words in English, or Yamato words in Japanese. Typically, the etymologically older, or “core” set of words is more restricted in the structures that it permits, and is (hence) subject to more processes. To capture such restrictions in Optimality Theory, Itô and Mester (1999) propose stratified grammars of the form in (1), where M stands for a Markedness constraint, and Faith stands for a faithfulness constraint. Faith-L1 is a lexically specific version of that faithfulness constraint (see also Pater 2000 for other arguments for lexically specific constraints).