Learnability Shapes Typology: The Case of the Midpoint Pathology

Abstract

The midpoint pathology (in the sense of Kager 2012) characterizes a type of unattested stress system in which the stressable window contracts to a single word-internal syllable in some words, but not others. Kager (2012) shows that the pathology is a prediction of analyses employing contextual lapse constraints (e.g. *E xt L apse R; no 000 strings at the right edge) and argues that the only way to avoid it is to eliminate these constraints from C on . This article explores an alternative: that systems exhibiting the midpoint pathology are unattested not because the constraints that would generate them are absent from C on , but because they are difficult to learn. This study belongs to a growing body of work exploring the idea that phonological typology is shaped by considerations of learnability.