@inproceedings{kasenov-2026-morpheme,
    title = "Morpheme structure phonotactics: a categorical model for morpho-phonological productivity in {R}ussian vowel-zero alternations",
    author = "Kasenov, Daniar",
    editor = "Voigt, Rob  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Feldman, Naomi  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, CA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/bulk-corrections-2026-07-02/2026.scil-main.15/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.15",
    pages = "147--159",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-412-5",
    abstract = "Nonce word studies motivate a notion of gradient similarity between nonce words and real words. In morpho-phonological research, similarity is often taken as to be a relationship between a nonce word and the list of morphemes / words that undergo a given morphophonological alternation (Albright and Hayes 2003; Becker et al. 2011 i.a.). This paper challenges this view on the basis of nonce word data on Russian vowel{--}zero alternations (Gouskova and Becker 2013; Becker and Gouskova 2016). I propose a model where morpho-phonological similarity is a relationship between the available underlying representations and the underlying representation the nonce item must have in order to undergo the alternation. The implementation of the proposed model matches{---}and in some comparisons exceeds{---}the performance of Becker and Gouskova{'}s (2016) MaxEnt-model. This study thus presents a linking hypothesis between nonce word studies and approaches that mark segments themselves as undergoing certain restricted alternations."
}