Learning with Properties: Restrictiveness and Typological Structure*

Abstract

A learner's task is to find the most restrictive grammar consistent with the data of their language. This paper develops an OT learning algorithm that incorporates typological-level information from Property Analysis to increase restrictiveness and successfully learn subset languages. Based on Tesar's (2014) Output-Driven Learner (ODL), Property-ODL (PODL) uses ERCs taken from property values encoding specific markedness > faithfulness rankings. PODL was tested in a learning simulation for the phonological system in Tesar (2014), Paka, which presents the challenging case of languages in paradigmatic subset relations. In ODL, these require additional methods to be learned. PODL eliminates the need for these in learning the paradigmatic subsets and overall reduces the use of less-tested methods in learning the grammars of the typology.

Summing constraints in and across properties

“…The set of ERCs delineating a grammar need not define a total – or partial – order over the entirety of Con : not all constraints are crucially ranked relative to one another in a given typology (see Prince 2017 on representing grammars). Identifying which rankings are crucial is the aim of Property Theory (see Alber et al 2016, DelBusso 2018 and Alber & Prince in preparation for introductions to Property Theory).…”

“…The latter case is a situation where crucial rankings are not strictly pairwise relationships between individual constraints, but between groups of constraints that act together. Such groups form a constraint class , abbreviated κ , which is appended with an operator, dom or sub , designating the highest or lowest member of the class, respectively, in their linear ordering (Alber et al 2016, DelBusso 2018 and Alber & Prince in preparation). For example, {X,Y}.…”

“…This in turn depends on the relationship of the summands in the full system, which can be difficult to ascertain from inspecting violation profiles in a violation tableau, where numerical quirks and other interactions can obscure the interactions. This paper uses Property Theory (Alber et al 2016, DelBusso 2018, Alber & Prince in preparation) to show the effects of summing constraints in two distinct kinds of relationships. The results show the predictable changes, and allow for the systematic comparison of related typologies.…”

“… 5 While the minimum value is not necessarily 0 (see Merchant & Prince to appear), it can be reduced to 0 in the universal violation tableau. DelBusso (2018) defines a minimal universal violation tableau , in which violation counts are reduced to the minimum value that preserves order and equivalence relations.…”

Where r you going? A typology of long-distance metathesis of liquids

“…I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. Meneguzzo 2016, Merchant & Krämer 2017, DelBusso 2018, Bennett & DelBusso 2018, an OT-based model which aims at extracting the properties, i.e. the ranking conditions that generate every language of a typological system.…”