Generalization of French and Portuguese plural alternations and initial syllable protection

Abstract

We present two cases of morphophonological alternations in the plural of nouns, one from French and one from Brazilian Portuguese. In both of them, monosyllabic items are protected from right-edge alternations more than polysyllabic items are, an asymmetry we attribute to privileged protection of initial syllables. We implement the analyses of the two languages using constraint-based grammars that take trends learned across the lexicon and predict the treatment of nonce words. Five large-scale nonce word tasks confirm the productivity of the trend in both languages.