The strength of morphophonological schemas: Consonant mutations in Polish

Abstract

Selective elimination of consonant mutations in Polish provides evidence supporting construction-based sublexicons and morphophonological schemas extracted from them. Morphophonological schemas exhibit various strength depending on their type frequency, they refer to morpheme-specific classes of segments and their impact is continuously mediated by paradigm uniformity pressures. A low-frequency and a highfrequency pattern are analyzed: agent nouns in -ist-a/-yst-a and diminutives in -ek. Two kinds of frequency are important predictors of pattern modification: type frequency and token frequency. As for the impact of type frequency, the less frequent a pattern is in the lexicon, the more susceptible it is to modifications promoted by paradigm uniformity. Schemas are ranked based on the type frequency of the morphological patterns they encode and interact with paradigm uniformity constraints. Schemas representing less frequent patterns are outranked by paradigm uniformity constraints and are thus more likely to be modified than those representing more frequent patterns. Regarding token frequency, the greater stability of high-frequency words than comparable low-frequency words is linked to their strong representations and a constraint promoting the use of stored representations. The continuous effect of paradigm uniformity effects gets support from the results of a nonce-word experiment.