In my dissertation I examined the interaction of the phonological grammar and lexicon through the lens of Lexical Conservatism (Steriade, 1997). Lexical Conservatism is a theory about what kinds of lexical and phonological factors influence speakers’ decision about how to pronounce a novel word. The hypothesis of Lexical Conservatism states that speakers avoid creating novel allomorphs, and instead preferentially recruit other stem allomorphs from elsewhere in a morphosyntactic paradigm to resolve marked structures created by affixation. I probed these questions using three experiments on English stress placement (chapter 2), and two experiments on Spanish mid-vowel diphthongization (chapter 3).

I found that English words which have phonologically advantageous Remote Bases are produced on a free-response task with right-shifted stress more often than nouns which do not. This effect only holds for individual participants who know both the Local and Remote Bases. The lexical qualities of the Remote Base such as semantic similarity and frequency, as well as classical phonological factors such as the Stress-to-Weight Principle and the avoidance of long lapses, also impact the stress placement in the novel form. I also find that the role of the Remote Base can be influenced on the level of the individual trial by priming, indicating that the Remote Base is actively recruited from the lexicon by the phonology, implying a rich and dynamic interaction unfolding over time and across grammatical domains.

I modeled this grammar-lexicon interaction in a Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar framework, proposing a new theory where each Base in the lexicon gets to exert a pull on the novel derivative, which is cross-cut by markedness considerations (chapter 4). This model incorporates information about the lexical status of the Remote Base into a contemporary constraint-based phonological framework by treating the lexicon as prior on the accessibility of different words to the grammar (chapter 5).