The local nature of tone-association patterns

Abstract

A computational notion of locality, based on forbidden substructures of a fixed size, is applied to autosegmental representations, and tone-association patterns are argued to be local. This is significant for phonological theory, for two reasons. First, this notion of locality provides for an explicit theory of tonal well-formedness that is superior to previous explanations in that it makes clear, restrictive typological predictions. Second, it provides a clear path for understanding how these patterns can be learned. A brief survey of major tone-association patterns shows that association generalisations which are edge-based (Mende and Hausa), quality-specific (Kukuya) or positional (Northern Karanga Shona) are all local in this way. This is contrasted with previous explanations of the typology, which require global reference to the directionality of association, and can thus overgenerate.

Tone Association and Output Locality in Non-Linear Structures

“…Importantly, the least fixed point typology of tone mapping exceeds that of both derivation-based frameworks (Zoll, 2003) and optimization-based frameworks (Prince & Smolensky, 1993) in terms of empirical coverage. It addresses an issue raised in (Jardine, 2017a), that found that simple one-to-one mapping of tones to TBUs as a function lies beyond established boundaries on phonological complexity. It is also establishes a computational definition of output locality in non-linear structures.…”

“…While tone mapping patterns have been studied computationally as well-formedness conditions (Jardine, 2017a), there is no positive characterization of them as processes. Here, we show that tone mapping patterns are describable by a restricted least fixed point logic, which gives a typological characterization of the nature of tone association that is unavailable to derivation-based frameworks (as noted by Zoll 2003) but can capture patterns that cannot be captured by the alignment constraints used in optimization-based frameworks (Prince & Smolensky, 1993).…”

Proceedings of the 16th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language

“…More importantly, we expect that these modeltheoretic tools, when applied to trees and other types of labeled graphs will provide insight into local accounts of autosegmental structures (Jardine, 2017) and other multi-tiered structures as well as model-theoretic accounts of syntactic constraints (e.g. Rogers (1998); Graf (2018) In this paper, we investigate the class of Output Tier-based Strictly k-Local (OTSL k ) functions.…”

Some classes of sets of structures definable without quantifiers

“…More importantly, we expect that these modeltheoretic tools, when applied to trees and other types of labeled graphs will provide insight into local accounts of autosegmental structures (Jardine, 2017) and other multi-tiered structures as well as model-theoretic accounts of syntactic constraints (e.g. Rogers (1998); Graf (2018)).…”