Examining learnability of grammar: a view from Kashmiri loanwords

In this paper, I address the issue of phonological learnability with a focus on Kashmiri loanwords. The variation of Kashmiri recorded in this paper exhibits two repair strategies while borrowing words from Hindi-Urdu, English, and Persian; namely, aspiration of voiceless stops at the coda position and epenthesis of a vowel in onset consonant clusters. I have attempted to analyze these issues using Optimality Theory. Checking the learnability of the proposed grammar, I show that it is possible to learn the grammar but the ranking differs when the model is examined using the Recursive Constraint Demotion and Maximum Entropy Grammar.