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We present evidence from experiments on novel blend formation showing that adult English speakers have access to constraints that give phonological privilege to heads, nouns, and proper nouns, even though the nonblend phonology provides no evidence that such constraints are generally active in the grammar of English. Our results (i) demonstrate that these positional constraints are universally available; (ii) confirm that the lexical category ‘proper noun’ has the status of a strong position, which has broader implications for the role of lexical categories in positional privilege effects; and (iii) confirm that strong positions based on salience from nonphonetic sources (such as morphosyntactic, semantic, or psycholinguistic salience) participate in position-specific phonological phenomena.

Nowadays natural language user interfaces, such as chatbots and conversational agents, are very common. A desirable trait of such applications is a sense of humor. It is, therefore, important to be able to measure quality of humorous responses. However, humor evaluation is hard since humor is highly subjective. To address this problem, we conducted an online evaluation of 30 dialog jokes from different sources by almost 300 participants -- volunteers and Mechanical Turk workers. We collected joke ratings along with participants» age, gender, and language proficiency. Results show that demographics and joke topics can partly explain variation in humor judgments. We expect that these insights will aid humor evaluation and interpretation. The findings can also be of interest for humor generation methods in conversational systems.

This paper incorporates morphological markedness constraints into a framework in which morphology and phonology directly interact, modeled with interleaving of morphological and phonological constraints in serial OT (Wolf 2008, 2009). Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against realization (or spell-out) of morphologically marked feature sets. The empirical data motivating this proposal mainly come from the case-study of Russian genitive plural allomorphy, which is analyzed as involving tradeoffs between morphological markedness and other constraints in the grammar, including the purely phonological ones. This proposal explains the otherwise apparently arbitrary and unnatural transderivational dependency between the nominative singular and the genitive plural in Russian. Additionally, this account of the genitive plural allomorphy provides a unified explanation for several seemingly exceptional sub-generalizations which upon examining lexical statistics turn out to be regular. Implications and predictions of an interleaved model with morphological markedness constraints are discussed throughout the article.

In this paper, I propose to extend a model of grammar in which lexical spellout and phonological computation occur in the same component (e.g., serial OT with Optimal Interleaving (Wolf, 2008)) with a family of morphological markedness constraints. These constraints punish realization of morpho-syntactically marked combinations of features. They form a markedness hierarchy in which constraints against more marked feature(s) are ranked higher than constraints against less marked feature(s). Inclusion of such constraints provides a natural way to account for certain cases of non-realization of morphological contrasts in marked contexts (zero marking), as well as cases of syncretism in which a marked paradigm cell in certain contexts becomes occupied by an exponent typically used in less marked cells. Analyses of both types of cases are discussed in this paper. Moreover, this model predicts tradeoffs and interactions between morphological markedness and phonological constraints. Russian Genitive Plural allomorphy, discussed in this paper, provides one example of such interactions.