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Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Joe Pater
Joe Pater*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
*
pater@linguist.umass.edu
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Abstract

The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of/t/- flapping. This short report provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the preflap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the intermediate level of representation of the standard analysis. The paper also provides a proposal for how the constraints are learned and shows how correct weights can be found with a simple, widely used learning algorithm.

Keywords

Canadian Englishopacityharmonic grammarweighted constraintslearnabilityoptimality theoryrule ordering

Information

Type
Short Report
Information
Language , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , March 2014, pp. 230 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Thanks especially to Paul Boersma for his collaboration on an earlier presentation of this research (Boersma & Pater 2007), and to Michael Becker, Elliott Moreton, Jason Narad, Presley Pizzo, and David Smith for their collaboration on versions of the constraint induction procedure described in §3. Thanks also to Adam Albright, Eric Baković, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Jack Chambers, Heather Goad, Bruce Hayes, Bill Idsardi, Karen Jesney, John McCarthy, Robert Staubs, and Matt Wolf for useful discussion, as well as participants in Linguistics 751, UMass Amherst, in 2008 and 2011, and at NELS 38, University of Ottawa, and MOT 2011, McGill University. This research was supported by grant BCS-0813829 from the National Science Foundation to the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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