Frequency and Other Biases in Phonological Variation

In the past two decades, variation has received a lot of attention in mainstream generative phonology, and several different models have been developed to account for variable phonological phenomena. However, all existing generative models of phonological variation model the overall rate at which some process applies in a corpus, and therefore implicitly assume that all words are affected equally by a variable process, namely at the overall rate observed in the corpus. In this paper, we show that this is not the case. Many variable phenomena are more likely to apply to frequent than infrequent words. A model that accounts perfectly for the overall rate of application of some variable process therefore does not necessarily account very well for the actual application of the process to individual words. We illustrate this with two examples, English t/d-deletion and Japanese geminate devoicing. We then augment one existing generative model (noisy Harmonic Grammar) to allow for the contribution of usage frequency to the application of variable phenomena. We propose that the influence of frequency is incorporated by scaling the weights of faithfulness up or down for words of different frequencies. We show that this augmented model accounts significantly better for variation than existing generative models, and consider the extension of the augmented model to other factors such as speech register, discourse situation, etc.