The previous post covered the essentials of strictly local (SL) and tier-based strictly local (TSL) dependencies over strings. We saw that even though TSL generalizes SL to a relativized notion of locality, it is still a restrictive model in the sense that not every non-local dependency is TSL. In principle that’s a nice thing, but among those non-local dependencies beyond the purview of TSL we also find some robustly attested phenomena like unbounded tone plateauing. Fair enough, but that does not mean that unbounded tone plateauing is entirely non-local.

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Omer has a recent post on listedness. I have a post coming up that expands on my comments there, but it isn’t really fit for consumption without prior knowledge of subregular complexity and how it intersects with the linguistic concept of locality. So I figured I’d first lead in with a series of posts as a primer on some of the core concepts from subregular complexity. I’ll start with phonology — for historical reasons, and because the ideas are much easier to grok there (sorry phonologists, but it’s a playground compared to syntax). That will be followed by some posts on how subregular complexity carries over from phonology to syntax, and then we’ll finally be in a position to expand on Omer’s post. Getting through all of this will take quite a while, but I think it provides an interesting perspective on locality. In particular, we’ll see that the common idea of “strict locality < relativized locality < non-local” is too simplistic.

With all that said, let’s put on our computational hats and get going, starting with phonology. Or to be more specific: phonotactics.

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Alright, let’s assume you’ve followed the instructions in the previous two posts on pandoc and the metadata header. You have a beautiful article that’s ready to be posted on the Outdex. But how do you get it there? The simplest option is to email it as an attachment to submissions@outde.xyz. One of the maintainers (probably me) will handle the backend stuff and send you a link to a preview version. If you’re happy with the preview, your article goes live. Otherwise, you mail in a revised version.

This process should work fine for simple documents that don’t need a lot of revising. But for those of you who are familiar with Github, we have a much slicker alternative.

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This is the second post on how to write submissions for the Outdex. The first one covered the use of pandoc for the actual content of your submission. However, a blog post is more than just its content. It also involves crucial metadata such as the author(s), the date it was published, or topic tags. Metadata also allows you to enable some advanced features. It’s a very powerful tool, but also very easy to use. All you have to do is add a short YAML-header at the very top. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t despair, it only takes 4 minutes to learn.

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This is the first post in an ongoing series of mini-tutorials for Outdex contributors. I’ll give a brief overview of some of the lovely pandoc features that authors can use for their outdex articles: formatting with markdown, syntax highlighting, Latex-style math, bibtex-style citations, and example numbering.

In the near future, there will be follow-up posts that cover the use of YAML headers for metadata, how to submit articles via Github, and some aspects of the talkyard commenting system we use. If anything’s unclear, please leave a comment.

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