Abstract

Consider the words ‘brick’, ‘blick’, and ‘bnick’. ‘brick’ is a word in English and ‘blick’ and ‘bnick’ are not. But most English speakers have the sense that ‘blick’ could be a word of English but ‘bnick’ could not be. One theory for why people have this sense is that ‘blick’ obeys a set of rules that characterize the English lexicon and that ‘bnick’ does not. (An example of such a rule might be: ‘a word cannot begin with a stop followed by a nasal’.) The study of such rules and the sound patterns of the lexicon in general is known as phonotactics, a subfield of phonology.

For many years the dominant idea in linguistics was that in each language there are criteria for whether a word is phonotactically valid or not, and a word could only be in the lexicon if it was phonotactically valid. Lately, this has shifted to the idea that phonotactics assigns a well-formedness score to words where some words are extremely good, some words are extremely bad, and most fall somewhere in between.

I will give a survey of how data science techniques are allowing researchers to extract information about the gradient phonotactics of the world’s languages.