A final stroll through the complexity zoo in phonology

๐Ÿ•‘ 8 min • ๐Ÿ‘ค Thomas Graf • ๐Ÿ“† September 09, 2019 in Tutorials • ๐Ÿท subregular, phonology, locality, strictly piecewise, strictly local, tier-based strictly local, typology, learnability

After a brief interlude, letโ€™s get back to locality. This post will largely act as a recap of what has come before and provide a segue from phonology to syntax. Thatโ€™s also a good time to look at the bigger picture, which goes beyond putting various phenomena in various locality boxes just because we can.


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Full non-locality: Strictly piecewise

๐Ÿ•‘ 7 min • ๐Ÿ‘ค Thomas Graf • ๐Ÿ“† August 24, 2019 in Tutorials • ๐Ÿท subregular, phonology, locality, strictly piecewise

Weโ€™re continuing our stroll through the subregular locality zoo, still in the service of ultimately being able to say something about syntax and its interface with PF and LF. We started out with SL as the most restrictive kind of locality. The step to the TSL region corresponds to a relativized notion of locality where itโ€™s not absolute locality that matters, but your position relative to other elements of a specific type. TSL is actually a cluster of different classes, with standard TSL at the very bottom. Depending on what context information the TSL tier projection may take into account, TSL expands to ITSL, OTSL, or IOTSL. While IOTSL has a very liberal notion of locality that can even accommodate insane patterns like nati, it still involves some level of locality. Thatโ€™s in stark contrast to the strictly piecewise (SP) dependencies of Rogers, Heinz, Bailey, Edlefsen, Vischer, Wellcome, and Wibel (2010), which throw locality out the window.


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