Speaker: Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: Magri and Anttila (submitted), “Probabilistic phonology is intrinsically categorical”
Time: Monday, September 29th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location:32-D831
Abstract: We say that an implicational universal (x, y) ? (x?, ?) holds for a (probabilistic) phonological grammar G if the probability of realizing the underlying form x? as the surface form ? is at least as high as realizing x as y (G(y | x) ? G(? | x?)). Ill try to present the general technique in Appendix F of the manuscript for exploring principles governing implicational universals in MaxEnt phonology, and then discuss two resulting properties developed in §§45, both of which are argued to be problematic.