Abstract

Learning reduplicative templates as hidden structures: the case of reduplication-phonology interactions

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Abstract

Models of morphophonological learning have focused primarily on concatenative processes, leaving the challenges of non-concatenative morphology largely unaddressed. Reduplication, the systematic copying operation (e.g., Ilokano pluralization [kal-kald'IN}] `goats'), is particularly revealing because successful learning requires the joint inference of prosodic templates that govern copying, underlying representations (URs) of stems and other affixes, and the phonological grammar. In this paper, we present a learner that tackles this challenge by allowing reduplication to be learned alongside general morphophonemic alternations, a combination that, to our knowledge, has not been directly modeled in prior computational work. We show that the learner successfully captures the attested typology of reduplication–phonology interaction.

Keywords: morphophonology, morphophonological learning, reduplication, maximum entropy models

How to Cite:

Wang, Y., (2026) “Learning reduplicative templates as hidden structures: the case of reduplication-phonology interactions”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4050