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Just in case you would have otherwise missed it: Mark Liberman wrote earlier today about flapping and related/interacting processes in English.

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But it’s not monomorphemic.

Tatamagouchi is both, though, (at least for English speakers) because it’s a place name. The cool thing about place names is that they can get pretty long, without internal morpheme boundaries to mess things up. Long names (four or more syllables) are good for telling us where secondary stress likes to go when there’s no derivational residue. So, perhaps, are active ingredients in heartburn medication.

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I have been following the discussion on flapping. While I tend to think that Bob is on the right track, there is one thing that really sets my teeth on edge, and that is his term “Underoptimization”. What is that supposed to mean? Sounds like a bad tune-up.

There seems to be a misconception here about what Lexicon Optimization is. Lexicon Optimization doesn’t mean that inputs have to look like outputs, or that inputs have to be fully specified either. It means only that the same grammar that determines outputs also predicts inputs. So depending on the grammar, Lexicon Optimization might imply that underlying forms are underspecified.

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Well, I’m starting to feel in over my head with the flapping and specification discussion Eric and I are having. My interpretation of Sally Thomason’s informal study (reported here) led to this exchange, in part because Eric found some unintended implications in it, and in part because I had bandied about terms like ‘underspecification’ without clarity.

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Bob is absolutely right — I grossly mischaracterized his Lexicon Underoptimization idea. (Bob concludes that my mischaracterization was “derived ultimately from [his] earlier failure to elucidate [his idea] adequately”, but I think he’s just being kind here; given that there was not a single mention of markedness in Bob’s original post, I had little if any justification for linking his thoughts about underspecification to any notion of markedness.)

Bob also makes very clear the issue with Lexicon Optimization that we’ve been discussing. When unleashed on morphemes with nonalternating [ɾ], Lexicon Optimization selects /ɾ/ and not /t/ or /d/ as the underlying representation; assuming that Sally Thomason’s experimental results tell us that the underlying representation of such forms actually has /t/, then (obviously) Lexicon Optimization makes the wrong choice. Bob’s Lexicon Underoptimization idea is meant to address exactly this problem: “when positing underlying representations, remove any feature specification that is not needed to generate the proper output”.

With all that cleared up, I still have questions — and I hope I don’t just mischaracterize Bob’s position again.

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In a discussion of the pre-OT issue of Radical vs Contrastive Underspecification, Kenstowicz (1994:508) provides what turns out to be an understatement for this week’s flapping discussion:

Finding solid evidence bearing on this issue has proved to be very difficult.

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Sharon Rose reminds me that her 4 1/2-year-old daughter Helen has been pronouncing taps in flapping contexts as [t] for quite some time now. Sharon is Canadian and her parents are English, and due in part to this background Sharon more often than not does not apply flapping herself. Helen’s father Tadesse is from Ethiopia, and there are also very few if any taps to be found in his English.

One might think, then, that Helen has picked up on the tendency in her family’s speech toward the variants without flapping. What’s interesting, though, is that Helen has [t] even where there is no [t] variant; so, words like latter and ladder are both [lætɚ] with a [t].

I have a guess about what’s going on here, consistent with what I’ve said before but probably on as flimsy a limb as what Bob said.

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I know I said I wasn’t going to go there, but now I feel the need to talk about Lexicon Optimization. Bob’s alternative suggestion, Lexicon Underoptimization, is an interesting idea, given the apparent facts that Bob thought it up to account for. But actually making it fly involves a whole lot more than Bob lets on.

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Over on Language Log yesterday, Mark Liberman noted an interesting eggcorn: deep-seeded for deep-seated. Today, Sally Thomason follows up with a post asking a question that is very appropriate for phonoloblog: in the case of taps in the flapping environment within morphemes (e.g., metal, meddle, mettle, medal) what is underlying — a tap, a /d/, or a /t/?

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