Multi-Syllable Phonotactic Modelling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new finite-state formalism called OFS Modelling for automatically constructing detailed multi-syllable phonotactic models across languages, capturing language-specific phonological patterns.

Contribution

It presents a novel multisyllable approach and a formalism that enables automatic, data-driven phonotactic modeling for multiple languages.

Findings

Successfully modeled German, English, and Dutch phonotactics.

Achieved close approximations of language-specific phonological forms.

Demonstrated language-independent prototype models.

Abstract

This paper describes a novel approach to constructing phonotactic models. The underlying theoretical approach to phonological description is the multisyllable approach in which multiple syllable classes are defined that reflect phonotactically idiosyncratic syllable subcategories. A new finite-state formalism, OFS Modelling, is used as a tool for encoding, automatically constructing and generalising phonotactic descriptions. Language-independent prototype models are constructed which are instantiated on the basis of data sets of phonological strings, and generalised with a clustering algorithm. The resulting approach enables the automatic construction of phonotactic models that encode arbitrarily close approximations of a language's set of attested phonological forms. The approach is applied to the construction of multi-syllable word-level phonotactic models for German, English and Dutch.