The Final-over-Final Condition, Stringency, and Typological Structure

Abstract

The Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC; Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014, et seq.) describes an empirical generalization about possible crosslinguistic word orders. This article presents an Optimality Theory account that derives FOFC using constraints in a stringency relationship. It analyzes the resulting typology through Property Theory (Alber, DelBusso, and Prince 2016, Alber and Prince in preparation). A property analysis explicates the internal structure of the typological space, showing how it explains the condition and how the same structure occurs more generally in stringency systems. The theoretical explanation is compared with that in another theory of typological structure, Parameter Hierarchies (Roberts 2012).