Unproductive alternations and allomorph storage: the case of Sino-Japanese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the phonology of Sino-Japanese within the framework of Optimality Theory, incorporating elements from Itō and Mester’s (1999) coreperiphery model. A major component of Itō and Mester’s model-the unmarked status of Yamato words-was challenged by Kawahara, Nishimura, and Ono (2002), who argued that Sino-Japanese must be the unmarked option. While it is true that Sino-Japanese is the least marked stratum, automatically declaring the least-marked stratum as the default incorrectly predicts that speakers will overgeneralize alternations regardless of their productivity. Taking inspiration from Kurisu’s (2000) analysis of Sino-Japanese geminates and Mascaró’s (2007) formalization of allomorphy, I propose that where a lower stratum’s alternations are unproductive, speakers actually store all allomorphs in the underlying form, thus exempting the stratum from the implicated faithfulness constraint. This allows the unindexed faithfulness constraint to be ranked higher as needed to ensure that only productive alternations are extended to novel items.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".