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      Comparing MaxEnt and Noisy Harmonic Grammar

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      Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
      Open Library of the Humanities

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          Abstract

          MaxEnt grammar is a probabilistic version of Harmonic Grammar in which the harmony scores of candidates are mapped onto probabilities. It has become the tool of choice for analyzing phonological phenomena involving probabilistic variation or gradient acceptability, but there is a competing proposal for making Harmonic Grammar probabilistic, Noisy Harmonic Grammar, in which variation is derived by adding random ‘noise’ to constraint weights. In this paper these grammar frameworks, and variants of them, are analyzed by reformulating them all in a format where noise is added to candidate harmonies, and the differences between frameworks lie in the distribution of this noise. This analysis reveals a basic difference between the models: in MaxEnt the relative probabilities of two candidates depend only on the difference in their harmony scores, whereas in Noisy Harmonic Grammar it also depends on the differences in the constraint violations incurred by the two candidates. This difference leads to testable predictions which are evaluated against data on variable realization of schwa in French (Smith & Pater 2020). The results support MaxEnt over Noisy Harmonic Grammar.

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              Computation of Multivariate Normal and t Probabilities

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
                Open Library of the Humanities
                2397-1835
                January 4 2021
                December 23 2021
                : 6
                : 1
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Massachusetts Institute of Technology
                Article
                10.16995/glossa.5775
                e86db578-8caa-4374-af89-4c2c380f0613
                © 2021

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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