Phonological c-command over strings
Thomas Graf
May 2018 

This paper is a computational investigation of how local and non-local information may interact in natural language phonotactics. Recent work in subregular phonology (Graf 2017) predicts that every constraint is either exclusively local or exclusively non-local, but never a mixture of the two. I show that this prediction is not borne out as at least four previously described phenomena combine local and non-local information: Korean vowel harmony, the non-final RHOL stress pattern, non-local blocking of local dissimilation in Samala, and non-locally conditioned local tone spreading in Copperbelt Bemba. However, the formal model of Graf (2017) requires only a minor generalization of its notion of locality in order to account for these cases while still excluding unattested phenomena like first-last harmony. The difference between the two lies in how local and non-local information is interwoven, with the attested patterns following a very limited template that is reminiscent of c-command in syntax. Based on these findings I conjecture that wherever local and non-local factors interact in phonology, they do so in a c-command-like fashion. This paper thus provides independent evidence for the hypothesis that phonology and syntax may be more closely related on a computational level than is commonly believed.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004080 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of NELS 2017
keywords:	computational linguistics, subregular complexity, locality, typology, syntax, phonology
Downloaded:	379 times

 

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